Chemistry History

Listeners have come to expect chatty, direct narratives that develop distinct characters and place those individuals squarely in the context of both their times and their disciplines, and this account of the noted physicist’s life delivers the goods. From her childhood in an oppressed Poland, the daughter of two highly educated individuals, Curie emerges as a driven woman, determined to excel for both her parents’ and her country’s sake - this drive informing everything that followed.

Here's a biographical profile of Charles Goodyear, the man who gave the world one of its most useful products - vulcanized rubber. Natural rubber, the milky sap of rubber trees, is not a very practical commodity. It melts in hot weather or cracks and freezes in cold weather. In 1839, Charles Goodyear came across a process that made rubber so useful it changed the world we live in. A century later there were 122 rubber factories in Ohio.

Detrás de cada fármaco se esconde una historia. Puede ser la de un investigador excéntrico que resultó ser un genio, un momento decisivo en la historia geopolítica, un nuevo avance tecnológico o un inesperado pero afortunado efecto secundario descubierto en un ensayo clínico. A través de datos curiosos, anécdotas poco conocidas y personajes un tanto extravagantes, Thomas Hager propone un recorrido por las diez drogas más significativas de la historia a la vez que muestra la evolución de nuestra cultura y práctica de la medicina.

This is a wonderfully enlightening history about the transformation of alchemy into chemistry, and along the way, explains how science vs. pseudoscience really works. A classic of its kind.