recap-2007-06-woeller

This is the recap by Frank Robinson, of a presentation by Dr. Harold Brown, at the June 10th, 2007 CDHS monthly meeting.

Our speaker this month was Dr. Harold Brown, who has been a CDHS member since 1994. A WWII Navy veteran, Dr. Brown got his PhD in chemistry from Wayne State University in Detroit, and was a longtime employee of Albany Medical Center.

Dr. Brown's subject was the work of Frederich Wohler (1800-1882; Wohler's name has an umlaut on the "o", which I don't know how to make on my word processor. That means the correct pronunciation is something like "Whirr-ler". But, in reading the rest of this recap, if you want to say "Woe-ler", that's OK.)

Originally trained as a medical doctor, Wohler never practiced in that field, turning instead to chemistry, and studied with Berzelius, eventually becoming a Professor in that discipline at Gottingen from 1835 until his death. Meantime, in 1828, Wohler performed a seminal experiment that was the main focus of Dr. Brown’s talk. Though his is not a household name like Darwin', Wohler in a sense laid a foundation for what Darwin later did.

At that time, chemistry was still in its infancy. We say that Newton earlier dabbled in alchemy, but the fact is, there was no "chemistry" in his day - alchemy was its precursor, but we don't even dignify it with the word "chemistry" because it was all wrong. In Wohler's day, chemists did know what elements were, and atoms, but knew nothing of subatomic particles. And they made a strict distinction between organic chemicals and all others - the former being produced by living organisms. It was believed that organic substances could not come from inorganic ones, or from human lab work, and that instead some "vital force" was involved, which gave life to living things. The nature of organic chemicals was confusing; Wohler likened the subject to an impenetrable primeval forest, that drove him nuts. A key problem was that chemists had no clue about molecular structure. For example, a molecule of 6 carbon & 6 hydrogen atoms can be various different substances depending on how those 12 atoms are put together. A big step toward understanding this was the German chemist Kekule's famous dream: of a snake eating its tail, which, he realized, was telling him that the structure of benzene (C6H6) was a ring.

Back to Wohler: In 1828 he was studying cyanates, and trying to make ammonium cyanate using silver cyanate. Whatever that means (I flunked organic chemistry myself). But never mind: those are inorganic substances. And what Wohler found he got was urea - organic!! This was mind-blowing. He ran naked through the streets shouting "Urea!" (Actually that was Archimedes, shouting "Eureka!" I couldn't resist.)

Again, making something organic from inorganic chemicals just was NOT supposed to be possible. By doing it, Wohler drove the first nail in the coffin of the "vital force" doctrine, or "vitalism" - and the idea that a "Creator" makes life and controls everything. Another German chemist, Von Liebig, pronounced this the start of a new era in science.

Though not integral to his main topic, Dr. Brown also made a few remarks about evolution. He noted that even Biblical literalists cannot deny the reality of the mutations that are the source of biological evolution; were there no mutations, every man would look like Adam; and every woman too. But, said Dr. Brown, "Science is not at war with religion. Science doesn’t give a damn about religion". As more truth is understood by science, our need for religious ideas reaches the vanishing point.

Dr. Brown concluded with a poem, modeled on a ditty authored by physicist Richard Feynman ("I wonder why I wonder"), but redirected toward anti-evolutionists:

I wonder, I wonder why.

I wonder why you wonder nought.

Is it is your genes

Or what you’re taught?

I wonder why you wonder nought.

The Work of Frederich Woehler