Abstract:     Starting in the 19^th century, the chemical industry provided the middle classes of the Western World with luxuries that only the rich had previously enjoyed.   After sketching some early milestones made by industrial chemists, author Sharon Bertsch McGrayne will focus on four 20^th century men who dramatize two present-day aspects of chemistry: the enormous benefits it can bestow, and the environmental problems it can cause.   Wallace Carothers introduced fundamental scientific research to the American chemical industry and invented nylon.   Paul Muller discovered DDT insecticide for a traditional Swiss dye company.   Thomas Midgley Jr. used the periodic table to invent Freon and put tetraethyl lead in our gas tanks.   Clair Patterson's hard-headed clean collection techniques and microanalysis got the lead out.

Biography:     Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of several books about science, including Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World and Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries.

Her work has been featured on the Charley Rose Show and reviewed in Nature, Physics Today, JAMA, Chemistry and Engineering News (C&EN), Chemical Educator, Chemist at Work, Discover, New Scientist, American Scientist, The Washington Post, and others.

McGrayne has appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday and been an invited speaker at more than twenty universities and at national laboratories. In Illinois, she has spoken at Argonne National Laboratory (three times), the University of Illinois (three times), and at Eastern Illinois University. For example, she gave the keynote address at ceremonies giving Noyes Hall ACS landmark status and spoke about Wallace Hume Carothers at the university's ACS chapter in 2002.

McGrayne has written for Science, Isis, American Physical Society News, Times Higher Education Supplement, Chemical Heritage Foundation, the ACS' Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, Notable American Women, and other publications. Excerpts of her books have appeared in The Chemical Educator, Chemical Heritage Foundation Magazine, ChemWeeks, and The Physics Teacher. Nobel Prize Women in Science is used extensively in college courses in the United States and Europe, and National Academy of Sciences presented the Empress of Japan with a copy of the book and now publishes it.

McGrayne is a former editor and co-author of extensive articles about science for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a former prize-winning journalist for Scripps-Howard, Crain's, Gannett, and other newspapers. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives in Seattle, Washington. Her web page address is http://www.McGrayne.com