Autonomous Developments Chemistry

The final chapter (Chapter 13) gives an outline of current trends in catalysis. Two points of view are adopted the first one focuses on developments in process engineering. Most often these have their origin in demands by society for better processes. The second point of view draws attention to the autonomous developments in catalysis, which is becoming one of the frontier sciences of physics and chemistry. 

When the Journal of Chemical Physics was founded in 1933, its first editor, Harold Urey, then associate professor of chemistry at Columbia University, wrote that "the boundary between the sciences of physics and chemistry has been completely bridged." 1 The appearance of the journal reflected the outcome of scientific developments during the last decades in which there had been a reshaping and reforging of links between two disciplines that had been largely autonomous since the early nineteenth century. 

Jhon Castaneda-Gomez is a native of Manizales, Colombia. He obtained his B.Sc (1999) from the University of Caldas and his M.Sc. (2007) from Del Valle University in Colombia. He has completed two years of the Ph.D. program at the School of Chemistry, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and working at the Department of Pharmacy on the development of analytical techniques for the isolation of complex polysaccharides from plant sources. 

Stanley E. Manahan is a professor of chemistry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he has been on the faculty since 1965, and is president of ChemChar Research, Inc., a firm developing nonincinerative thermochemical waste treatment processes. He received his A.B. in chemistry from Emporia State University in 1960 and his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1965. Since 1968, his primary research and professional activities have been in environmental chemistry, toxicological chemistry, and waste treatment. He teaches courses on environmental chemistry, hazardous wastes, toxicological chemistry, and analytical chemistry. He has lectured on these topics throughout the United States as an American Chemical Society local section tour speaker, in Puerto Rico, at Hokkaido University in Japan, at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, and at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela. He was the recipient of the Year 2000 Award of the environmental chemistry division of the Italian Chemical Society. 

The genesis and development of quantum chemistry as an autonomous subdiscipline owed much to those scientists who were able to realize that what had started as an extra bit of physics was going to become a central part of chemistry". Those that manage to escape successfully from the thought forms of the physicist [17] by implicitly or explicitly addressing issues such as the role of theory in chemistry, and the methodological status of empirical observations helped to create... 

Automated combinatorial chemistry has, over the past ten years, firmly established itself as an autonomous chemical discipline. Ensembles of highly diverse compounds in the substance libraries of the chemical industry constitute a valuable reserve for developing new active substances. 

It is clear that innovative instruments and measurement strategies are required to cure the undersampled environment problem. They can be developed and deployed if ongoing advances in a wide range of enabling technologies are adapted and exploited. For many environmental challenges, measurement requirements favor real-time, mobile, autonomous instruments. The resulting quantum leaps in measurement capabilities will have the potential to revolutionize atmospheric and environmental chemistry. 

Physics and chemistry developed into autonomous disciplines in the early 19" century (Nye 1993). On the contrary, the formation of engineering disciplines occured later and under different circumstances. Actually, their full recognition as scientific disciplines and their institutionalization as part of higher education was achieved only at the end of the 19 century. The dynamics of this process depended on the specific cultural contexts and can only briefly be sketched in the following. 

Biomedical Research I oratory, Department of Chemistry, VHNSN College (Autonomous), Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, India Peptide and Proteomics Division, Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Delhi, India... 

---