Roald Hoffman: Dry science needs to recover a sense of the emotional

From the Bronowski lecture given by the Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University to St Mary College, London

There was chemistry before the chemical journal. The new was described in books, in pamphlets or broadsides, in letters to secretaries of scientific societies. These societies, for instance the Royal Society in London, chartered in 1662, or the Académie des Sciences, founded in Paris in 1666, played a critical role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Periodicals published by these societies helped to develop the particular combination of careful measurement and mathematisation that shaped the successful new science of the time.

I think the chemical article form rigidified finally in the 1830s and 1840s and that Germany was the scene of the hardening. The formative struggle was between the founders of modern German chemistry – people such as Liebig – and the Naturphilosophen. In that particular period the latter group might be represented by Goethe's followers, but their like was present elsewhere in Europe even earlier, in the 18th century. The Natural Philosophers had well formed notions, all-embracing theories, of how Nature should behave, but did not deign to get their hands dirty to find out what Nature actually did. Or they tried to fit Nature to their peculiar philosophical or poetic framework.

The early 19th century scientific article evolved to counter the pernicious influence of the Natural Philosophers. The ideal report of scientific investigation should deal with the facts (often labelled explicitly or implicitly as truth). The facts had to be believable, independent of the identity of the person presenting them. It followed that they should be presented unemotionally (so in the third person) and with no prejudgment of structure or causality (therefore the agentless or passive voice).

The scientific article acquired in this period a canonical or ritual form. The dominant language has changed, for interesting geopolitical reasons, to English. Yet it seems to me that there is not much change in the construction or tone of the chemical article. Oh, marvellous, totally new things are reported. Measurements that took a lifetime are made in a millisecond. Molecules unthinkable a century ago are easily made, in a flash revealing their identity to knowledgeable us. All communicated, with better graphics and computer typesetting, in a flashier journal, probably printed on poorer paper. But essentially in the same form. Is that good, is that bad?

I love my complex molecular science. I know that its richness was created by human beings. So I'm unhappy to see their humanity suppressed in the way they express themselves in print. The periodical article system of transmitting new knowledge has worked remarkably well for two centuries or more. But there are real dangers implicit in its current canonical form. The article reports real facts, but at the same time it is unreal. It obscures the humanity of the process of creation and discovery in chemistry. By removing emotion, motivation, the occasionally irrational, we may have in fact done much more than chase away the Naturphilosophen. What we have created is a mechanical, ritualised product that 6x105 times per year (that's the rough number of chemical articles published annually) propagates the notion that scientists are dry and insensitive, that they respond only to wriggles in a spectrum.

I would argue for a general humanisation of the publication process. The community should relax those strictures on portraying in words, in a primary scientific paper, motivation, whether personal and scientific, emotion, historicity, even some of the irrational. So what if it takes a little more space? As it is, we can keep up with the chemical literature, and tell without much trouble the mass of hack work from what is truly innovative. And we recognise hype ever so easily. I think science has much to gain from reviving the personal, the emotional, the stylistic core of the struggle to discover and create the molecular world.