MARK OF A CHEMIST

Science is an art of keen observation and understanding of what we see around us. There is a widespread, firm belief in our society that “Science” is a dry and rigorous study reserved only for the elite. Changing the psychology of the society over issues that have been believed over a long period of time is a herculean task. Today, science has reached all corners of the world enlightening people. But all this started in the twentieth century. With the industrial revolution, there was a scientific fervur created in the public. Primo Levi, Peter Atkins, Robert Woodward, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson and Geoffrey Chaucer are some of the very few people, who, for the first time, brought “Science” out of the labs and gave it a human touch!

In the words of Feynman, “these folk are typically of a Platonic mindset, revealing in what they regard as the crystalline beauty of physical theory, with its deep principles of symmetry and universality, to them, it seems as if the ability of chemists to make sense of the messy complexities of molecules is akin to magic.”

Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist who authored several books, novels, collection of short stories, essays and poems. He was a Holocaust survivor. Levi was a student of University of Turin. The racial laws and the prevalent fascism in the then Italy forced him to work in remote places of Milan with a false name and false papers. He later joined the partisans and fought against the Germans; captured and sent to the death camps in Auschwitz. He survived only because he was a chemist, an incident which in turn made him a writer!

The Germans, during the second world war, were running out of rubber for their military vehicles. So, they set up a synthetic rubber factory, very close to the death camp. They needed chemists to work in this new factory and Levi, starving in the German winter, successfully cleared an exam, to prove to the Nazis that he was indeed a real chemist. As he worked inside the warm labs, others froze to death outside. He is more famed for the way he wrote about chemistry, writing about the choice of turning one chemical into the other, the mysteries, not sounding like the precise science of the textbooks. He spoke of what chemists feel like. He was not a great chemist; he did not do any special discoveries. But he represents thousands of chemists, who worked very hard, during the 1940s but whose voices were never heard, making him a great chemist!

The Periodic Table, by Levi in 1975 is a masterpiece, where he uses his experience and knowledge as a chemist to narrate the intriguing relationships of

his childhood. Levi knows everything about chemistry and we know very little, which is crucial to enjoy The Periodic Table. Many of the situations are presented as puzzles that Levi solves or fails to solve. He presents fiction and reality wrapped in a metaphor of Chemistry. Levi had been concerned that his books might be admired more as a wartime witness than as a literary achievement. The reader begins to understand that chemistry is not just a "subject" instead, as he says “bewildering intellectual scaffolding laboriously erected to frame reality: it is reality”. Chemistry is what happens when we breathe,  when we see, when we touch .Our behaviour with others is also chemistry at some greater level. 

Levi describes the laboratory preparation of zinc sulphate as “the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure …”.When he could not find the sodium necessary to purify and dehumidify the Benzene he wanted to distill, he used it twin in the periodic table, Potassium, and nearly blew up the laboratory. From it he concludes that one dare not trust the almost the-same, the practically identical. "The differences can be small, but they lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of those differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade." He offers parallels between the reactions in a test tube and the things that happen in the world at large. The Periodic Table was named the Best Science Book Ever written in Chemistry, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

The Mark of a Chemist is another very famous work by Levi. He writes about what it is like to be a student of Chemistry. In the theatrical dialogue based on a selection of his texts, he answers to the questions of the interviewer. In an intense and unique exchange, he talks about his scientific vocation, his life, witness to the concentration camp, and his experiences as narrator and a laboratory technician. The conversation touches upon the discoveries and emotions of a young chemist who was attracted by the secrets of matter. It covers the painful perversions on scientific knowledge in the laboratories of Auschwitz, the challenges and the joys of the work done well. Primo Levi carried the mark of he being a chemist on his skin. He was a chemist by trade and a chemist out of a deep passion.  The mark is in his writings.