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To me there was a touch of irony in the inclusion in the March 2002 issue of a review of Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten (1). Except for a bit of lead and sulfuric acid, some organic molecules, and a scrap of tin, where, in that issue, is the sort of chemistry about which Dr. Sacks wrote? Although I had no Uncle Tungsten, my boyhood was similar to that of Dr. Sacks. Experimenting with real chemical substances was what led me to become a chemist. How many students now know even what ordinary chemicals look like, let alone how they act? Can the excitement of another wiggly line on a computer screen compare with that of a handful of gallium (or in my case, bromine)? Can one more thermodynamic argument, however elegant, compare with the magic of the transition metals and their compounds? The other day I was tutoring a couple of high school chemistry students. They were writing chemical equations and were surprised to learn that chemical equations are meant to represent phenomena, occurrences that can actually be made to happen in the laboratory. Ah, chemistry, where art thou? Literature Cited- Schwartz, A. T. J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 312.
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