Stephen Contakes

The Soviet resonance controversy was a chemical counterpart to Lysenkoism in which Soviet ideologues charged that Linus Pauling’s resonance concept was hostile to Marxism. We study it here to illustrate the role of social factors in science-faith dialogue. Because Soviet chemists were attentive to ideological dimensions of the controversy, they were not only willing to engage in public dialogue but also offered a response that decoupled the scientific aspects of resonance from ideological hostility, largely by modifying how they talked about delocalized chemical bonds. This enabled them to criticize and reject a pseudoscientific alternative to resonance and to avoid a Lysenko-like takeover of theoretical chemistry without threatening the wider Soviet social system. A potential lesson is that Christians in science who wish to promote fellow believers’ acceptance of their work would do well to account for the role of ideology in religiously motivated antimainstream science efforts.

Two case studies are presented illustrating how leaders of chemical enterprises addressed ethical questions posed by the incendiary napalm. The first one examines how the chemist Louis Fieser grappled with the ethical questions posed by his development of the napalm incendiaries used against military and civilian targets in the Second World War. The second involves the Dow Napalm Controversy, in which Dow Chemical engaged protests over its role as a supplier of napalm to the American military in Vietnam. Dow weighted the protesters’ charges that napalm was being used indiscriminately on civilians against what it saw as an obligation to support the American government and soldiers in their aims of defending South Vietnam against a communist insurrection. Both cases are examined from a Just War viewpoint to illustrate chemists’ responsibilities in the weapons development pipeline and the dilemmas that can arise in weapons development and over foreseeable misuses of chemical products.

Josiah Parsons Cooke established chemistry education at Harvard University, initiated an atomic weight research program, and broadly impacted American chemical education through his students, the introduction of laboratory instruction, textbooks, and influence on Harvard's admissions requirements. The devoutly Unitarian Cooke also articulated and defended a biogeochemical natural theology, which he defended by arguing for commonalities between the epistemologies of science and religion. Cooke's pre-Mendeleev classification scheme for the elements and atomic weight research were motivated by his interest in numerical order in nature, which reflected his belief in a divine lawgiver