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plans, who imposed information-sharing onmedicine through the doctrine of informedconsent. Furthermore, legal mechanisms,including licensing and malpractice litiga-tion, currently provide the only quality stan-dards (inadequate though they are) in medi-cine. There is a lack of enthusiasm for sharingeven minimal quality information withpatients, and such things as medical mal-practice lawsuits and disciplinary proceed-ings should teach us that physicians areunlikely to share performance experiencewith patients without a law that compels thisdisclosure.

Millenson’s book is a well-written andeasily digestible entry into the world of thehealth information prophets. But if you arelooking for something that explores what in-formation matters to physicians and patients,and how it can be collected and used in a waylikely to benefit patients by providing themwith better and more personal care, youwon’t find it here. We must have some agree-ment on the goals of medicine before weknow what to count to help us to decide if‘we’ are doing ‘better’. Only then can we tell ifwe are in the midst of an information ‘revo-lution’ or just getting more informationfaster in ways that have little impact on ourmedical treatment decisions.George Annas is in the Health Law Department,Boston University School of Public Health, 715Albany Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02118, USA.

Chemist as catalystJustus von Liebig: The ChemicalGatekeeperby William H. BrockCambridge University Press: 1997. Pp. 374.£50, $79.95

Kostas Gavroglu

Justus von Liebig (1803–73) was one of themost intriguing figures in the history ofchemistry, and his personality and careerprovide ample material for exploring manythemes in the history of science. Appointedto a little-known university, he transformedchemistry teaching and created the proto-type of a modern research school that madethe University of Giessen in Germanyfamous the world over.

Liebig was almost obsessively preoccu-pied with convincing others of the catalyticrole of chemistry, with the aim of giving sci-entific status to pharmacy, physiology, agri-culture and husbandry; this in turn changedthe way in which pharmacists, physiologists,doctors and botanists thought about andpractised their disciplines. He was also anassiduous popularizer, and his Familiar Let-ters on Chemistry, written over a 20-yearperiod, was hugely successful in informingthe public of developments in chemistry notjust in Germany but throughout Europe and

the United States.For a historian of science, Liebig’s career

encapsulates the tension between the privateand the public scientist, helps to probe therelationship between the necessary precisionof scientific language and the rhetoric ofpublic discourse, encourages contemplationof the difficult issue of popularization,reflects the symbiosis of teaching andresearch, provides a well-defined laboratoryspace to examine the legitimization of newpractices, and draws attention to the compli-cated links between the social repercussionsof public disputes and their content.

William H. Brock, a professor of historyof science at the University of Leicester inEngland and one of the foremost historiansof chemistry, has written an admirable biog-raphy of Liebig that gives most of these issuesa balanced yet rigorous treatment. AlthoughBrock emphasizes Liebig’s British connec-tions, he provides an international perspec-tive by portraying Liebig as a gatekeeper: “Inadopting the gatekeeper image, I have inmind the ways in which Liebig acted as anentrepreneur and propagandist for theextension of chemistry’s boundaries.”

Liebig’s public agenda was intertwinedwith a quasi-methodological programme toplace chemistry at the core of all activitiesthat would further the well-being of nations.Chemistry, for Liebig, was a mature science,and there were other disciplines that,through the intervention of chemistry, couldthemselves acquire scientific status. Theywould consequently be more effective andgive rise to all kinds of new fields.

Liebig’s involvement in modernizing thetraining of pharmacists began in the 1830s,when Philipp Lorenz Geiger decided toupgrade Annalen der Pharmacie. Time andagain, both men stipulated that pharmacistsneeded to learn more about the chemicalconstitution of drugs, and that medical edu-cation had to include pharmacy and chem-istry as a significant part of its curriculum.

A few years later, in 1840, Liebig had com-pleted his Agricultural Chemistry, arguingthat agriculture had to transcend empiricallysystematized techniques and transform itselfinto a science through the extensive help ofchemistry. Liebig also had a lot to say in thebook about plant physiology; and he initiat-ed lines of argument that he would furtherdevelop in his Animal Chemistry publishedin 1842, where he expanded his thesis aboutthe interrelationship of animal physiologyand animal pathology.

Academic controversies and public dis-agreements are almost synonymous with thecareers of high-profile scientists. Liebig wasno exception, and he was often hot-tempered, spiteful and insidious. His deal-ings with people involved in disputes werefurther strained by his unwillingness toadmit that many of his suggestions and tech-niques in agricultural chemistry and hus-

bandry were neither well defined nor capa-ble of being corroborated with precision.

But, as is often the case with those whosemain preoccupation is the advancement oftheir ideological agendas rather than therelentless pursuit of their adversaries, Liebigwas a master at realizing when a quarrelmight get out of hand and was then quick tobring it to an end. Interestingly, he avoidedthe long-standing controversies of organicchemistry, especially those relating to atom-ic weights and chemical structure.

Liebig forged a special relationship withmany British chemists, industrialists andpoliticians and even with some members ofthe royal family. Most importantly, throughthis relationship, radical changes werebrought about in Britain’s scientific educa-tion. The translation of his books, his force-ful propaganda, his well-placed connectionsand the single-mindedness with which hepursued even several unconfirmed theoriesand techniques led to the transformation ofEnglish farming and the practice of agricul-tural chemistry.

In 1845, Liebeg was offered the chance tosettle in London. Many in Britain had hopedthat he would accept the professorship at thenewly established Royal College of Chem-istry, so that they could reap all the teachingand research innovations that he was suc-cessfully developing at his own university inGiessen.

Liebig declined the offer and instead rec-ommended Wilhelm August Hoffmann,one of his former students, who stayed in thepost for 27 years. Hoffmann, together withthe ever-increasing number of British stu-dents who spent time at Liebig’s laboratoryin Giessen and returned to Britain to holdvarious posts, became the most effectivepublicists for Liebig’s many agendas.

Liebig’s frequent trips to Britain and hiswidespread contacts made him an acute

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Liebig: “hot-tempered, spiteful and insidious...but a master at realizing when a quarrel mightget out of hand”.

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observer of the ways of the British, as shownin a letter he wrote in 1844 to Michael Fara-day: “What struck me most in England wasthe perception that only those works of apractical tendency awake attention and com-mand respect; while the purely scientific,which possess far greater merit, are almostunknown.” Liebig could not have expressedbetter the difference in style and approachbetween British scientists and those on thecontinent.

There have been many excellent articleson various aspects of Liebig, especially theresearch school he created at Giessen. Brock’sexcellent biography is, however, the firstpublished in English since 1901. It includesthe translation of the report to the Prussiangovernment on the chemical laboratory atGiessen by C. W. Bergemann, a professor ofpharmacy at the University of Bonn, as well

as a valuable list of Liebig’s British and Amer-ican students.

By using the gatekeeper metaphor, Brockhas satisfied a pressing need for a work thatwould systematically present Liebig’s multi-farious activities. It is worth noting Brock’ssuccinct expression of Liebig’s own percep-tion of himself as a gatekeeper: “He was thevoice that was in position to draw attentionto the inexhaustible supplies of neglectedwealth that the commercial and industrial-ized nations of the world could mine by fol-lowing the chemical road... and howchemists themselves saw their roles intellec-tually as possessing civic worth in a modernsociety.”Kostas Gavroglu is in the Department of theHistory and Philosophy of Science, Universityof Athens, 37 John Kennedy Street, 161-21Athens, Greece.

Signs of the timesComets, Popular Culture, and theBirth of Modern Cosmologyby Sara Schechner GenuthPrinceton University Press: 1997. Pp. 365.$49.50, £32.50

Donald Yeomans

My personal collection of comet memora-bilia contains broadsheets, or flyers, issuedfor the appearances of comets Kohoutek andHalley around Christmas 1973 and in March1986 respectively, and comet Shoemaker–Levy 9’s impact with Jupiter in July 1994. TheKohoutek broadsheet asks “What will theChristmas monster bring?” The Halley flyerscreams out “Behold! Halley’s comet is com-ing! The end of mankind is near!” The broad-sheet for Shoemaker–Levy warns that thecomet’s impact with Jupiter is surely an ulti-matum from Almighty God: we must ban allcrime, indecency and violence, or face globalextinction from an Earth-hitting asteroid.

I am struck by the similarities in supersti-tion between these recent broadsheets andthose issued two or three centuries ago. Theancient fear of comets as signs or agents ofterrestrial disaster has at least partly survivedto the present day.

One of Sara Schechner Genuth’s mainpoints is that comets have been considered assuch signs, or agents, of change throughoutmost of recorded history. Before the mid-seventeenth century, they were often viewedas atmospheric signs sent to warn sinfulhumanity that God was not at all pleasedwith its conduct. Even the demonstration, byIsaac Newton and Edmond Halley in the lateseventeenth century, that comets were celes-tial objects orbiting the Sun did not sweepaway the superstitious fear of comets. ForHalley had noted that comets travel aroundthe Sun in elongated orbits, so they could,from time to time, collide with Earth.

Thereafter comets were feared not assigns from an angry God but as agents ofGod’s wrath. Their terrestrial effects were nolonger seen as localized but rather as global,and Newtonian mechanics could be used topredict which comets might pose a threat. Inthe late seventeenth century, Newtoninvoked comets as vehicles for replenishingthe planetary fluids consumed by the processof vegetation and putrefaction and for re-supplying the Sun and other stars with fuel sothat these celestial fires could continue. Forhis part, Halley invoked cometary closeapproaches or collisions to explain thebiblical flood, the periodic extinction andrenewal of Earth’s life forms, and even theorigin of the world and its eventual demise.

Cosmologists in the eighteenth centuryexpanded on these views. Comets could create, destroy, reform or restore planetarysystems. But in the nineteenth century came

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Some three billion years ago, in the Earth’smantle, the hardest natural substance in theworld was formed and stored. Kimberlite andlamproite magmas later brought it to thesurface. Now researchers use it for creatinghigh-pressure cells to investigate planetaryinteriors and dense matter, mimic the Earth’score or produce solid hydrogen.

The scientific story of the diamond is onefacet of a new exhibition at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York, “TheNature of Diamonds,” which runs until 26 April1998. The exhibition is accompanied by a bookof the same name written by the museum’scurator of gems and minerals, George E. Harlow(Cambridge University Press, $75, £55 (hbk);$29.95, £19.95 (pbk)).

Transliterated from the Greek ‘adamao’meaning ‘I tame’ or ‘I subdue’, the stone’s namehas become connected with power and strength,and these associations are explored in culturaland historical facets of the exhibition. Thesesections lead on to a stunning array of jewelsfrom the Middle Ages to the twentieth century,

including the Incomparable (pictured),weighing 407.48 carats — the third-largest cutdiamond in the world.

But the exhibition offers plenty forinterested scientists to get their teeth into.Interactive displays illustrate the mainproperties of diamond, such as its hardness,refractive index, conductivity and colour — theblue diamond, for example, gets its colour fromminute amounts of boron.

The way diamonds are formed is explainedin detail, with displays taking the observerthrough their history.

The use of diamond in research is alsohighlighted. As well as the diamond anvil cell,whereby two stones are squeezed together tocreate pressures of up to 4.5 millionatmospheres, diamond is also a universalcutting tool and, because of its apparent iciness— heat-conducting ability — is used inelectronics to manage heat.

For both science and spectacle, thisexhibition is a real gem.

Alison Mitchell is an assistant editor of Nature.

Diamonds in spades