Books in the Synthesis series

In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc, a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. This title offers portraits of the people significant to Genentech's science and business, including co-founders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson.

"For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. The details of her relationship with Robert Boyle, her younger brother, have mostly remained a mystery, even though Boyle, "the father of chemistry," spent the last twenty-three years of his life residing in her home, with the two dying only one week apart in 1691. The dominant depiction of Lady Ranelagh shows her as a maternal figure to Boyle or as a patroness of European intellectuals of the Hartlib circle. Yet neither of these portraits captures the depth of her intellect or range of her knowledge and influence. Philosophers, mathematicians, and religious authorities sought her opinion on everything from decimalizing the currency to producing Hebrew grammars. Lady Ranelagh practiced medicine alongside distinguished male physicians, treating some of the most elite patients in London, and her medical recipes and testimony concerning the philosophers' stone both gained international circulation. She was an important influence on Boyle and a self-standing historical figure in her own right. Chemistry's Sister fills out Lady Ranelagh's legacy in the context of a historically sensitive and nuanced interpretation of gender, science, and religion. It reveals how one elite seventeenth-century woman, without suffering attacks on her "modesty," managed to gain the respect of diverse contemporaries, effect social change, and shape science for centuries to come"--

"This book resurrects science history between Robert Boyle and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier by telling the story of a remarkable genius who devised an innovative, comprehensive, and experimentally based theory of alchemy/chemistry (called chymistry) that was widely celebrated and adopted both in his own time and after. Wilhelm Homberg (1653-1715) is a bridge between traditions: he held an expansive vision for chymistry as a natural philosophical discipline while at the same time continued to pursue metallic transmutation, only lightly veiled in his official publications. In Lawrence M. Principe's hands, Holmberg's life and work, particularly at the Acadâemie Royale, provide new insights on several of the significant changes that chymistry underwent during and immediately after his lifetime. This new biography radically revises what was previously known about the contours of chymistry and scientific institutions in the early eighteenth century"--

Focuses on Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a Dutch medical and chemical professor whose work reached a wide, educated audience and became the template for chemical knowledge in the eighteenth century. This title reveals how Boerhaave restructured and reinterpreted various practices from diverse chemical traditions - including craft chemistry.

Provides the study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe. In this title, the author demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies.

By studying the chemists at the Swedish Bureau of Mines and their networks, and integrating their practices into the wider European context, the author illustrates how they and their successors played a significant role in the development of our modern notion of matter and made a significant contribution to the modern European view of reality.

The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. This book brings to life the hybrid origin story of biotechnology and ways the academic culture of science has changed in tandem with the early commercialization of recombinant DNA technology.

William Hyde Wollaston made an astonishing number of discoveries in an astonishingly varied number of fields. This book features length study of Wollaston, his science, and the environment in which he thrived. It will help to reinstate Wollaston in the history of science and the pantheon of its great innovators.

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. This title tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology.

Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes. When we think, microscopic "channels" in our brain cells' membranes open and close; when we run, tiny "motors" in our muscle cells' membranes spin; and when we see, light operates "molecular switches" in our eyes and nerves. A molecular-mechanical vision of life has become commonplace in both the halls of philosophy of science departments and the offices of drug companies developing "proton pump inhibitors" or medicines such as Prozac.  Membranes to Molecular Machines explores just how late twentieth-century science came to think of our cells and bodies this way. This story is told through the lens of membrane research, an unwritten history at the crossroads of molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology and the neurosciences, that directly feeds into today's synthetic biology as well as nano- and biotechnology. Mathias Grote shows how these sciences have not only made us think differently about life, they have, by reworking what membranes and proteins represent in laboratories, allowed us to manipulate life as "active matter" in new ways. Covering the science of biological membranes since the mid-1960s, this book connects that history to contemporary work with optogenetics, a method for stimulating individual neurons using light, and should appeal to scholars interested in the intersection of chemical research and the life sciences.

"Aniline and azo dyes were the first of many novel substances that chemists began to synthesize on an industrial-scale from coal-tar, a waste product of the gas industry. The new dyes, originally intended for textiles, were soon added to food, becoming one of the first laboratory-created, industrially manufactured chemicals to be used in our daily life in unexpected ways. By the time the risks and uncertainties surrounding the synthesized chemicals began to surface, the dyes were being used everywhere from clothes and furnishings to cookware and food. A Rainbow Palate examines how chemists in Europe and the US maneuvered themselves to become instrumental players in new regimes of food production, regulation, and quality testing. As increasing industrialization, international trade, and competition led to mounting concerns about food adulteration, manufacturers and retailers, politicians and the public all invoked chemists to represent their interests. As Carolyn Cobbold reveals, the widespread use of new chemical substances and techniques influenced perceptions and understanding of food, science, and technology as well as trust in science and scientists. Because the new dyes were among the earliest contested chemical additives in food, the battles surrounding their use offer striking insights and parallels into today's international struggles surrounding chemical, food, and trade regulation"--

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, this book combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today.