The German Genius

to mark the occasion, ten speeches were delivered. 1
    Each speech honored one man, the last to speak. The dinner, known as the Benzolfest, was held to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a discovery he had made that brought to a head one of the great adventures of the mind in the nineteenth century and that had occurred only after half a century of painstaking inquiry. The man was August Kekulé and his discovery was the benzene ring and the belated realization that there was such a thing as a molecule, the smallest particle of a chemical compound that can exist, that it has a structure—a shape and a size, with specific properties depending on that structure—and that this was the basic building block of organic chemistry, the chemistry of life, the chemistry that governs biology. 2
    Organic chemistry had been invented—or discovered—seventy years earlier. It was one of three breakthroughs that made the middle years of the nineteenth century a heroic age for biology. The second was the development of fertilizers, which transformed agriculture at a time when many people all across Europe were leaving the land to work in the new metropolises, so that the demand for food had reached unprecedented levels. The third was the identification of the cell, the realization that it was the basic building block of both plants and animals, and that its differentiation made up the various organs of living things. Between them, these developments transformed medicine, concepts of illness and wellness, industry (dyes, fertilizers, cosmetics, drugs) and—insofar as the new discoveries explained life processes and linked inert matter conceptually to living organisms—played a major philosophical and religious role in refining our understanding of ourselves at a time when traditional beliefs were under severe threat.
    The vital role played by carbon in the science of natural products—organic chemistry—was known from a fairly early date. What puzzled people was why one element out of the dozens already known should account for the amazing diversity of natural substances. This strange state of affairs helps account for the fact that so many scientists of the early nineteenth century believed that chemistry was not enough to explain the diversity and that some kind of “vital force” must be operating. 3
    The term “organic chemistry” had crept into use around 1777, though understanding was rudimentary, and early textbooks did little more than list the various substances regarded as organic: gum, saliva, urine, albumen, gelatin, and blood, which many regarded as an “impossibly complex” substance. 4
    Systematic sense was first put into this field by the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier, who showed that several natural products—alcohol, sugars, and acetic acid (from vinegar)—contain only three elements: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The two men who built on this and therefore came to personify the emergence of organic chemistry were Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler. From about 1824, for roughly three decades, von Liebig and Wöhler investigated almost every area of the new science, publishing hundreds of research papers and teaching thousands of students (8,000 in Wöhler’s case). Wöhler, three years older than von Liebig, was quiet and modest, slender, and always looked much younger than he was (when he met Michael Faraday on a visit to Britain, Faraday thought he was talking to Wöhler’s son). 5 Von Liebig, on the other hand, was an irascible, all-too-fallible man who, as John Buckingham says in his history of early biology, had a career disfigured by more than its share of failures, mistakes, and acrimonious squabbles (at one stage his British publishers refused to print a book of his because of the libels in the text). Nevertheless, von Liebig’s achievements opened a new era in the discovery of the organic molecule.
    He was born in May 1803 in Darmstadt and studied chemistry under Wilhelm Kastner at Bonn and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac in Paris, where analytic methods were then much more rigorous than in Germany. His breakthrough came when, on the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig I of Hesse appointed von Liebig extraordinary professor at the University of Giessen. Almost immediately, he and two colleagues set up their own teaching laboratory. The twenty places were soon filled, and the founding of a new chemical laboratory at Giessen signaled the beginning of the eastward migration of