Organic Chemistry: A View and a Prospect ' 



By Sir Alexander Todd 



Professor of Organic Chemistry 

 University of Cambridge, England 



Organic chemistry is as old as chemistry itself, but it was first rec- 

 ognized as a separate division at the end of the 18th century. Its 

 growth to become not only the largest part of chemis.:ry, but one of the 

 largest of all the sciences in its factual content and in the number of 

 its adherents, has occurred essentially during the past hundred years — 

 since indeed it acquired its necessary theoretical basis through the 

 work of Frankland, Couper, Kekule, van't Hoff, and Le Bel, to men- 

 tion only the major names associated with the basic structural theory 

 of carbon compounds. Today its rate of growth is as fast as ever and 

 the output of original work is prodigious. Some idea of that output 

 is given by the calculation made a few years ago that, assuming an 

 organic chemist were to read for 8 hours each day, it would take him 

 about 18 months to read all the literature in his own subject produced 

 during one year and published in the standard European and Amer- 

 ican journals. 



Parallel with the phenomenal growth of the science, there has been 

 an equally phenomenal growth of organic chemical industry until 

 today it is a vital factor in the economy of Britain as well as of all other 

 industrial countries. During the 6 years ending in 1960, when chemi- 

 cal industry as a whole showed an annual growth rate of 6.5 percent 

 (as against an over-all rate of 3.1 percent for industry as a whole), 

 the annual rate of growth for certain of the main organic sectors was 

 even higher (plastics 15 percent, general organic chemicals 13 percent, 

 pharmaceuticals 8.4 percent). These figures reflect the constantly 

 growing impact of organic chemistry on nearly every aspect of our 

 material civilization, for many products of the industry based on it 

 such as plastics, synthetic fibers, dyes, detergents, adhesives, coatings, 

 etc., are absorbed by and form a vital part of a variety of industries 

 not themselves ordinarily regarded as chemical. In these circum- 



* Reprinted by permission from The Times Science Review, London, No. 42, Winter 1061. 

 (C) The Times Publishing Co., Ltd., 1961. AU rights reserved. 



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