Analytical Chemistry Quotes (3 quotes)
Be a physical chemist, an organic chemist, an analytical chemist, if you will; but above all be a Chemist.
[Admonishing his students to avoid over-specialization.]
[Admonishing his students to avoid over-specialization.]
F. H. Getman, The Life of Ira Remsen (1940), 71.
In 1912 I went to a book sale and bought ten books for fifty cents. One of the books was by Ostwald The Scientific Foundations of Analytical Chemistry. Ostwald wrote at the beginning of that book that analytical chemists are the maidservants of other chemists. This made quite an impression on me, because I didn't want to be a maidservant.
Comment during interview, Beckman Center (15 March 1984), as recorded on tape held by The Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. Quotation provided by W. H. Brock.
We may regard [Scheele] not only as having given the first indication of the rich harvest to be reaped by the investigation of the compounds of organic chemistry, but as having been the first to discover and make use of characteristic reactions by which closely allied substances can be detected and separated, so that he must be considered one of the chief founders of analytical chemistry.
In Treatise on Chemistry (1877, 1890), Vol. 1, 23.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
