Scientific language, progress

Research in Chinese medicinal herbs has been conducted for decades in China, Japan, and Korea and recently in the West. Unfortunately, language barriers and the unreliability of sources and herbal material have hampered progress. A basic scientific understanding of the Chinese herbal preparations is the first step toward building consumer confidence in herbal medications. Proper procedures to eliminate adulteration, contamination, and toxic side effects are also urgently needed to regulate the use of Chinese herbs. 

We shall show that, once it had become impossible to make Latin a popular language common to all Europe, the continued use of it in the literature of the sciences could have had only a transitory usefulness that the existence of a sort of scientific langu e, the same for all nations, alongside the different langu es spoken by the ordinary people of each country would have divided men into two classes, perpetuated prejudice and error, and placed an irremovable obstacle in the way of true equality in the use of reason and in the acquisition of necessary truths and that, if the progress of the masses of the human race had in this way been suspended, ultimately, as in the East, the progress of the sciences themselves would have come to a stop. 

Berzelius was the lirst to determine the atomic mass of the elements with satisfactory accuracy. It was he who introduced the chemical symbols still in use. His dualistic electrochemical hypothesis concerning the structure of compounds was a fundamental and progressive chemical theory for a long period. He was one of the pioneers of elemental analysis of organic substances. Berzelius wrote numerous books. His manual of chemistry has been translated into several languages and was reprinted five times in Berzelius s lifetime. In his annual reports, entitled Jahresbericht, published from 1821 until his death he critically abstracted the scientific publications of the year. The Jahresbericht was the ancestor of the numerous present scientific abstracting publications, all of them can be traced back to it. Besides cerium Berzelius discovered... 

He has been a member of the scientific committees of International Congresses of Theoretical Chemists using Latin Languages since 1971, of the Mediterranean Schools on Surface States and Chemical Bonds since 1997, of European Workshops on Quantum Systems in Chemistry and Physics since 1996. He was also a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, the Journal of Molecular Structure (Theochem), Molecular Engineering, and Progress in Theoretical Chemistry and Physics. He was the founding editor of Folia Chimica Theor-etica Latina. 

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