Why Chemistry

“My father was a forest phytopathologist and helped me develop an interest in the sciences. When I was 13 I began attending a very good specialized physical mathematical high school. I was ready to be “picked up” by a good teacher. I thought I could become mathematician or physicist.

But an incident changed everything. It turned out that the teacher who supposed to teach my first chemistry class was on sabbatical that year. A professor from the chemistry department of our local university was replacing her. He quickly recognized my interest in science and took me to the university to participate in a young research group which worked with high school students. The group leader, Dr. Boris Solomonov, and his student team had enormous influence on me. As a result, I was most successful in chemistry Olympiads. In my last high school year, I won an International Chemistry Olympiad. I turned out to the `best in the world’ at that moment and decided to pursue my career as a chemist.”
Andrei N. Vedernikov, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of Maryland, College Park. He is a 10-year ACS member.

“When I was young I would have questions about nature - such as why is the sky blue or why is the ocean salty? I would go to my father and he would answer these questions for me. When I asked him how he knew these things, he said that he read it in some chemistry and science books. I thought, ‘Wow, if you know that stuff, chemistry and science, then you can get the answers to everything there is to know about how the world works.’ That was really astounding to me.”
Mary Carmen Gasco-Buisson, former ACS Scholar; Brand Manager, Olay Global Design, Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a 12-year ACS member.

“My interest in chemistry was sparked by two outstanding high school teachers, and by my experience at a small undergraduate institution, Xavier University (Ohio), where I had a lot of contact with the faculty and received a lot of personal attention. But the real “spark” came from two summer research programs during my college years. The first was at Oak Ridge National Labs in 1973 and the other at the University of Minnesota in 1974. The latter experience was particularly important. I did research for Professor Edward Leete, and really got turned on to organic chemistry.”
John Lechleiter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, Ind. He is a 34-year ACS member.

“When I was a student at Louisiana State University I was invited to attend an ACS National Meeting in Dallas. One of the panels I sat in on included Linus Pauling and a number of other notables. I had never heard such scintillating ideas. That really was a turning point for me. I absolutely had to go to graduate school. I knew I had to work in research because how else would you meet such exciting people and have new ideas that would change your life?”
Sharon Vercellotti, President, V Labs Inc., Covington, La. She is a 23-year ACS member.

“Growing up in Peru, I was always intrigued by the ancient Nazca’s textiles. Nazca was a pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in a desolate coastal region of Peru about 2,400 years ago. One of the most impressive characteristics of these textiles is the richness and depth of color. As a young child I often questioned how do we know how old is this material? And secondly how can we preserve these textiles? All of these questions were answered when I visited my uncle, a chemical engineer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.”
Carmen Valdez Gauthier, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Fla. She is a 21-year ACS member.

“I grew up in a small city about 100 miles north from Rio de Janeiro. There were not many opportunities at that time, except for medicine, so I dreamed about becoming a doctor. However, in my first year in high school I started learning chemistry and I did very well in the exams. For the first time I considered changing my career choice. Then, in my second year in high school, in the first chemistry class, the teacher assigned some homework, which would count for an extra point in the exams. I remember it was about classification of hydrocarbon chains, an introduction to organic chemistry. I was the only student in the class who did the work correctly and qualified for the extra point. From that moment on I realized that chemistry would become a part of my life and I forgot doing medicine.”
Claudio J.A. Mota, Institute of Chemistry, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a 15-year ACS member.

“When I was about 8 years old, my mother noticed all of the measuring devices and glassware were disappearing from our kitchen. So she started looking around and discovered I’d cleaned out my closet and put together a rough chemistry lab in there. Soon after that, my parents figured out a way to afford a real chemistry set for me.”

John Clevenger, Professor of Chemistry, Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno, Nev. He is a 42-year ACS member.

“I became a chemist mainly because of my desire to help everyone else. And by that, I mean not just people in the United States. I really mean everyone else. I think being a scientist is very important to me because it is important to use our lives to help other people.”
Tom LeBon, Associate Dean, City of Hope Graduate School of Biological Sciences, Duarte, Calif. He is a 31-year ACS member.

“My first passion for chemistry started as a high school student at Marengo High School in rural Alabama. The subject fascinated me so that I knew that I had to do something in chemistry. Because I loved both math and chemistry equally at that time, I decided to attend Tuskegee University and major in chemical engineering. After a couple of years of majoring in chemical engineering and also doing an intern in the field, I felt that I had more interest in the chemistry side of things. Therefore, in my junior year, I changed my major to chemistry.”
Sylvester Mosley, former ACS Scholar; Postdoctoral Research Associate, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Bethesda, Md. He is a 4-year ACS member.

“My dad was a machinist and was very good at taking things apart and understanding how they worked from a mechanical standpoint, which I always found interesting. But I wanted to know at a more fundamental level how things worked. And I think that’s what drove me into chemistry ─ wanting to understand at the atomic or the molecular level how things work or how things are put together.”
Steve Showalter, chemist at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. He is a 20-year ACS member.

“The chemistry bug did not “bite” until I was a first-year college student attending a local community college. I took a chemistry course for non-science majors and I thought the class was EXTREMELY easy, so I decided that if this was all there was to chemistry, I would become a chemist. Now, the classes obviously became harder later on! But, I was hooked.”
Sibrina Collins, Director of Graduate Diversity Recruiting, University of Washington. She is a 12-year ACS member.

“I was going through my formative years about the time that Sputnik went up. So I got very interested in science along with a lot of other people. One day in the library I found a book called Chemistry Magic, which was enchanting. It described lots of fun experiments. It was almost like a National Chemistry Week manual.”
Russell W. Johnson, Corporate Fellow, Honeywell International, Inc., Des Plaines, Ill. He is a 36-year ACS member.

“My father was a pharmacist and owned a pharmacy in Astoria, Queens, NYC, and I worked in the pharmacy as a teenager during the late 1940s. During that period I developed a keen interest in chemistry because of the availability of chemicals used for prescription compounding. I recall reading chemistry books to learn more about compounds that were on the shelves. This led to my creating a chemistry set from a collection of these chemicals. I performed numerous experiments, some quite dangerous, as I had a fascination with explosives. I made my own gunpowder-firecrackers and generated explosive metal azides and nitrogen triodide.

One day my father asked me what I would like to do as a career. Since I was talented in drawing, I replied that art as a career was of interest to me. I remember his reply ─ `Do you want to starve?!’ He suggested I pursue a pharmacy degree. Since I had an equal fascination for both art and chemistry I decided to take his advice. My plan was to obtain my degree in pharmacy and then pursue a career in the chemistry of medicinals.”
Philip Portoghese, Distinguished Professor, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Editor, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He is a 48-year ACS member.