Stories of the Invisible by Philip Ball, Oxford University Press,
$19.95, ISBN 0192802143
HOW sexy is your discipline? If you opted for a yawn-inducing field, here鈥檚 a
hint: change its name. Suddenly the boredom that once washed over your audience
at first mention of the fatal word will vanish. Chemists have been front runners
in this game. Their subject has a 19th-century air about it. As if to recapture
the glory days, chemistry departments are refashioning themselves as institutes
of molecular science.
This academic rebranding does reflect a change of emphasis, but it also
conceals a serious question. Should chemistry be designated an endangered
subject? Tweeze molecules apart and manipulate individual atoms with lasers and
suboptical microscopes, and chemistry seems to become an arm of physics.
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Traditional organic chemistry appears to be turning into a mere fiefdom of
the larger realm of molecular biology. Theoretical physicists further undermine
its foundations. They have explained the periodic table and atomic bonds by
means of quantum mechanics, so hasn鈥檛 old-fashioned chemical explanation become
superfluous?
But that argument doesn鈥檛 hold up any better than the proposition that a
complete enumeration of the properties of concrete and steel will put architects
out of a job. As Philip Ball says in Stories of the Invisible, chemists
today are engineers working on the microscopic scale, creating molecules and
fine-tuning their properties rather than merely describing what is already out
there. Ball laments the bad press that chemists have been getting lately from
people who prefer 鈥渘atural鈥� to 鈥渟ynthetic鈥� without being able to say what either
word means. His response is not to draw up a long list of the wonders of
chemistry, but instead to offer sketches showing what the modern chemist is up
to. If chemists have become molecular engineers, he says, they are doing nothing
that nature hasn鈥檛 already been doing much better, and for a longer time.
Ball鈥檚 writing is sharp and鈥攈elped by a sprinkle of quotations from
Flann O鈥橞rien, Primo Levi and Thomas Pynchon鈥攄rolly intelligent. His task
isn鈥檛 easy, however. Engineering is a matter of building many different things
for individual and unrelated purposes. In this profusion of activity, it鈥檚 hard
to find and maintain grand themes and narrative connections. Ball offers snappy
accounts of the discipline鈥檚 take on topics ranging from digestion to molecular
computing and adds a mass of fascinating detail. Yet at times this is just a lot
of trees that fall short of becoming a forest.
A case in point is the piece on metabolism and digestion, which ends with
Alfred Nobel, dynamite and modern high explosives. It brought back
long-forgotten bits of undergraduate chemistry and biology, but also left me
wondering what larger message I had missed. The writing is reliably good and
often excellent, yet the passages don鈥檛 always add up to a satisfying whole.
But Ball succeeds splendidly when he tackles fibres. The narrative cleverly
weaves together discussions of silk, muscle tissue, Kevlar and microtubules,
showing how molecular structure and supramolecular arrangement evoke physical
attributes. Collagen can be the basic stuff of your cornea as well as your
bones, he explains, because biological synthesis has achieved subtleties of
nanoscale manufacturing that laboratory scientists still only dream of.
This treatment is genuinely illuminating, not so much for the facts but for
the underlying principles and connections Ball teases out. The subject formerly
known as chemistry has plenty of life in it.