Man of the Hour Read online

  While still in California, he was notified that he had been reappointed assistant professor for another three years. “Which will make eight in all for that,” Patty pointedly wrote her father, impatient for her husband’s promotion. With his job secure, Conant immediately began making plans for his next trip, an expedition to Germany. Harvard granted him the time off, albeit without salary. He had not been teaching long enough to rate a paid sabbatical. Richards was far from happy about his plans. Why anyone would want to spend time in the country that had almost brought Europe to the brink of ruin was beyond him. But Conant had long been fascinated by the question of how Germany became so dominant in the field of organic chemistry in the half century before the war, and the only way to find the answer was to investigate its universities and laboratories for himself.

  Just before they were due to set sail in February 1925, Richards sent over an early birthday present for his daughter: a large check to help cover their expenses, and a packet of letters to the German professors he had known well before the war. “You are a thoughtful, helpful, generous dear to give us so much,” Patty wrote her father, aware of what the gesture must have cost him. “It makes us a wonderful easy send-off, and will open all sorts of doors.”

  They found Germany in the grip of an ugly, brooding nationalism. The Treaty of Versailles had brought peace but not tranquility, and the new Weimar Republic seemed to satisfy no one. The country was reeling from the effects of the devastating postwar inflation, and the general atmosphere, Patty reported in her diary, was of “a most sadly defeated community that is struggling back to normality.” Conant, whose German was “fearfully bad,” had to rely on his wife, who had studied the language in her youth, to play the part of translator. They took up residence in a shabby but comfortable pension in Munich, the only Americans among a group of impoverished German aristocrats who had been driven from their large homes by the “horrible Socialist burgermeisters.”

  The Conants were unprepared for the extent of the bitterness about the war. “It seems like dragging up the past to us,” Patty wrote, “but to the people here the uneasy present is continuous with that past.” Of course, they had been warned that Munich was “the center of discontent,” a hotbed of ultranationalists, Communists, anti-Semites, eugenicists, and political extremists of all kinds. To say nothing of the ominous rumblings that accompanied Adolf Hitler’s recent return as head of the Nazi Party after his failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. Hitler had been sentenced to five years in prison but was paroled after serving less than nine months by his sympathetic Austrian jailers. Although still barred from making public speeches, he used the time behind bars to write his autobiography, Mein Kampf. All in all, it was a very different Germany than the one Conant had imagined.

  He argued for hours with his German colleagues over the Treaty of Versailles and who started the war and could not help feeling unsettled by the rabid tone of political discourse. One conversation he overheard was so disturbing in its implications, it left him deeply troubled. He was standing with a group of senior academic and industrial chemists who, in an unguarded moment, were proudly assessing the progress their country had made in the last two years, applauding the stabilization of the mark, withdrawal of the French from the Ruhr Valley, and recent election of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president. “That’s all very well,” remarked one of the industrialists, “but let us not forget the debt we owe to those men who went out, revolver in hand, and assassinated those who were leading the fatherland astray!” Unmindful of his presence, or perhaps unaware that he could comprehend their meaning, the men all agreed, wholeheartedly approving the casual reference to the murder, three years earlier, of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a prominent Jewish politician, by members of a right-wing nationalist group. “Such sentiments made my hair stand on end,” recalled Conant. “I had never heard assassination justified before. I wondered to myself how a republic could be built on such a foundation of violence.”

  As he traveled from university to university, visiting Hamburg, Frankfurt, Göttingen, Marburg, Tübingen, Erlangen, Würzburg, Halle, and Dresden, speaking to German scientists at a time “when friendly intercourse had only just been resumed,” Conant felt he was learning more about the country’s cultural malaise, its political and economic problems, than he was about chemistry. Throughout that spring and summer, he listened to them talk about the present state of German science and lament their past greatness, a time when their country was at the zenith of organic chemistry. He went to the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Ostwald, and came away awed by the list of topflight chemists he had taught, including Richards, who had been one of his students in 1885.

  While Conant was not able to fully answer his question about how Germany achieved such a monopoly on organic chemistry in the prewar period, he came away convinced that part of the answer lay in the more formal structure of their university system, combined with high professional standards and an intensely competitive spirit. “The rivalry among universities as well as among individuals had resulted in ruthless intolerance of mediocrity and showmanship,” he reflected. “Yet the German system, to an American, seemed heartless.”

  He was also struck by his discovery of the important role research assistants played in the leading university laboratories. He had always assumed the “massive contributions” made by these institutions were the products of graduate students working under an acclaimed professor. Instead, he learned that German chemists routinely employed research assistants who had already earned their doctorate, and more often than not these trained men remained with them for several years, tackling problems that would be much too difficult for students. At the University of Munich, for example, the “elaborate and tricky” investigations of the structure of chlorophyll and other plant pigments that won Richard Willstatter a Nobel Prize in 1915 had been carried out entirely by research assistants, while the direction of his PhD candidates had been relegated to an associate professor.

  Recognizing that this arrangement went a long way to explaining German organic chemists’ “impressive output,” Conant immediately began contemplating how he might implement a similar setup for his own benefit. He did not have to wait long to find out. That spring, he learned that he had been awarded a grant from the William F. Milton Fund for his hemoglobin work: $3,500 for the first year, and $2,800 for the second. The cash infusion would pay for an assistant and the apparatus. It was not as much as he needed, but it was a start. “[Jim] is simply delighted,” Patty proudly informed her parents. “It’s work he couldn’t do alone, too endlessly complicated; but it’s very interesting and now can be really explored. Cheers!”

  Before he left Germany, Conant made a trip to the legendary Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, and paid his respects to Fritz Haber, who in the seven years since the armistice had become notorious as the “father of chemical warfare.” In what Conant recalled as a “cordial” meeting, the two men who had competed to develop more effective annihilating gases politely shook hands and talked shop. Haber’s active work on chemical weapons ended in 1918, but not before his lab had investigated lewisite’s potential as a weapon and concluded that it was less effective than mustard. It seems unlikely, however, that he would have broached the sensitive subject. Although Haber was proud of his service to his country and had been highly decorated, he had paid a price for his patriotism: his wife, Clara Immerwahr, also a chemist, committed suicide by shooting herself in the heart with his revolver on May 2, 1915, reportedly following an argument over his having personally overseen the initial deployment of chlorine gas at Ypres ten days earlier. His name was an “anathema” to Richards, who was among the many chemists to express his consternation when Haber was awarded a Nobel in 1919—after being passed over the previous year—for synthesizing ammonia.

  In Conant’s eyes, however, Haber was a pioneer, a quasi-heroic figure from the glory days of German science, before the
Kaiser Wilhelm’s reputation was tarnished by the war. He was “curious” to meet the brilliant physical chemist and have an opportunity to discuss their common research interests. Conant regaled him with the story of his first attempt at an oxidation reaction using an electrochemical battery apparatus, and his excitement at having made “a great discovery,” only to be informed by a professor a few days later that Haber had completed the exact same experiment before the war. No doubt, the fifty-seven-year-old Prussian scientist was flattered by the American’s frank admiration. “He paid me the greatest compliment an older man can pay a younger,” recalled Conant. “He listened with interest as I spoke.”

  * * *

  On his return to Harvard in the fall of 1925, Conant resumed his research with dogged zeal. But after only a year, he was unhappy with his progress. Promotion still eluded him. Moreover, he felt his work was being impeded by the disproportionately heavier teaching load he had to carry as one of the junior members of the department. As the low man on the roster, he also got last pick when it came to graduate students. Adding to his malaise was the deplorable state of Harvard’s laboratories, which were an embarrassment compared with those he had toured in Germany. Boylston Hall, built in 1857, had not been remodeled in more than a half century, and was hopelessly dark, cramped, and old-fashioned. Ceilings had collapsed, brought down by floods from above, and the cupboard sashes were so old they gave off a continual rain of iron rust. With the example of German productivity still fresh in his mind, Conant was determined to find a way to improve his situation and opportunities for research. In late 1926, when Arthur A. Noyes of the California Institute of Technology approached him about joining the faculty, Conant was restless and dissatisfied, and ready to make a break.

  Eager to recruit a chemist of Conant’s reputation, Noyes promised terms and working conditions that far exceeded anything he could expect at Harvard. It was, by any standards, “a most attractive offer”: a full professorship, four private assistants, and funding for four fellowships—a financial package totaling $25,000. When Conant made it clear he was underwhelmed by the $7,000 salary, Noyes explained that it was what Caltech paid its physicists, and insisted it would only be for the first year. “The sky’s the limit,” Conant reported back to Patty. The idea of heading his own laboratory of organic chemistry turned his head. After a two-month sabbatical in Pasadena, California, in the spring of 1927, he had more or less made up his mind to leave Harvard.

  When he was finally summoned to a meeting with Lowell, the two staunch New Englanders faced each other awkwardly, “anxious to avoid anything that looked like bargaining.” When Conant stated his intention to resign, Lowell responded that he would be “foolish” to throw his lot in with an unknown institution based on uncertain wildcat financing. If he accepted their invitation to go out west, the crusty Brahmin added, “They will end by making you president.” To which Conant promptly responded that Lowell, of all people, could “hardly regard such a fate as a misfortune.”

  Mired as he was in tradition, Lowell had no intention of allowing such a high flier to be poached by a West Coast upstart. Harvard agreed to make him a full professor with a salary of $7,000, effective September 1, 1927. Before he was done, Conant negotiated additional financial support for research, and extracted a number of other concessions, reducing his teaching load and excusing him from tedious administrative chores. He celebrated his promotion by immediately hiring several of Roger Adams’s best postdoctorate fellows and assembling his own crack research staff. He set them to work on his next project, determining the molecular structure of chlorophyll.

  * * *

  It was little more than a century since two French chemists, Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienamé Caventou, coined the term chlorophyll, combining the Greek words for “green” and “leaf” to describe the mysterious substance in plants that they knew to be essential but did not understand. Six or seven generations of chemists had since tried to crack nature’s code. Some of the best scientific minds in the world were involved in the hunt to discover the nature of this vital compound, but progress was slow, and the bypaths and false leads many. Building on the work of his predecessors, Conant was finally able to piece together the complicated mosaic of the green-colored molecule—a vast family of 137 atoms, including those of the elements hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and magnesium—and establish, at last, the structure of chlorophyll. The number of atoms in chlorophyll and their distribution among the various elements had been known for some time, but he was able to prove the exact arrangement and chemical linkage of the component atoms. He went “neck and neck” with the German organic chemist Hans Fischer, who was working on the same problem—though with a different theory as to its composition—but ended up confirming the Harvard investigator’s experimental findings. It would turn out to be among Conant’s most significant work, and the contribution that he himself was most proud of, garnering him both the Chandler award and, a year later, the coveted William H. Nichols Medal from the American Chemical Society.I

  Just as Conant had anticipated, once his energies were focused exclusively on chemistry, his research output increased dramatically. Convinced that many complex chemical problems would yield to a clever integration of scientific efforts, he sought out ways to integrate his research with that of colleagues in other disciplines, giving rise to a great variety of highly original experimental investigations. Conant’s diverse ideas and discoveries had a major impact on the development of science. It is a very technical field, but for example, today the leveling effect of water and similar basic solvents on acidity is accepted as fact, but when he first advanced the idea it was unfamiliar and almost counterintuitive. In 1927, working with his friend Norris Hall, he carried out an investigation of extremely strong acids in nonaqueous solvents, and introduced the concept of “superacidity.” Conant went on to develop the concept, showing that sodium acetate, frequently used as a catalyst in experiments, could function as a strong base in acetic acid. And in one of his last major series of studies, he and George W. Wheland initiated a quantitative understanding of extremely weak acids and, using sodium triphenylmethyl as the strong base, were able to determine the acidities of acetophenone, phenylacetylene, fluorene, and diphenylmethane. The generalization of acid-base behavior implied by these experiments was revolutionary for the time, and provided a strong impetus to progress.

  Conant also originated, or helped to originate, several other fundamental aspects of chemistry. “He was among the group who applied C-11 (it was the only isotope of carbon then available) to a trail-blazing study of the metabolic pathway,” recalled Frank Westheimer, a Conant protégé who later became a professor of chemistry at Harvard. “He and G. B. Kistiakowsky initiated the measurement of the heats of hydrogenation of organic compounds, so as to improve the precision of thermodynamic data relative to those available from heats of combustion. He and Percy Williams Bridgman were the first to investigate the effects of extremely high pressure on the rates of reaction of organic compounds, and discovered the acceleration of polymerization by pressure.” And in his work with Paul D. Bartlett on the mechanism of semicarbazone formation, Conant distinguished clearly between kinetic and thermodynamic controls. “That paper alone,” exclaimed Westheimer, “exerted a powerful influence on developing theory.”

  Conant was never satisfied unless he was doing seminal work and moving the boundaries of science. Westheimer, one of Conant’s last graduate students, recalled his mentor’s brutal appraisal of one of his independent projects. “I described my research project to him. He thought about it for a minute, then he said, ‘If you are successful, you’ll be a footnote to a footnote in the history of chemistry.’ ” The remark hit home. Conant’s critical evisceration made Westheimer realize that what he had done was “an utterly trial piece of research.” But it also had a reinvigorating effect, and he promised himself he would never again do work that was not “potentially important.” It had never occurred to him, until that mom
ent, that he might be able to have “a real part in the history of chemistry.”

  Conant, on the other hand, was clearly chasing history. He produced papers at an astonishing rate, oversaw a busy laboratory, and mentored over sixty young chemists, male and female, many of whom would become future leaders in the field. The places in his laboratory were eagerly sought, as he had what Kistiakowsky recalled as almost a “magnetic attraction for budding chemists.”

  “He was a very, very energetic, dynamic sort of person,” observed Bartlett, who recalled that Conant led by example. “He expected people to be smart, to get the general idea, plan their moment by moment strategy, and to tell him when they’d found something.” If their research turned up something of interest, rather than give instructions on how to proceed, he would ask: “And what are you going to do next?” His expectation that the student would have good ideas of his own was “a constant stimulus toward its fulfillment.” At the same time, Conant’s absorption in his research was such that he could not always be bothered with the demands of his advisees. Finding him hunched over an experiment one night, a former student remembered presenting him with his study guide to approve and watching as Conant “without ever removing his eye from the test tube, groped with one hand for a pencil, felt for the card, signed it, and pushed it away, never once looking at it or the student.”