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Policy

Chemistry Behind The Wall

February 8, 2010 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 88, Issue 6

I would like to add some further observations to the extremely interesting article "Chemistry behind the Wall" (C&EN, Nov. 9, 2009, page 42). In the summer of 2001, I was carrying out research at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. In the course of that summer, I interviewed a number of chemists whose careers had begun during or not long after World War II. Although most of the interviewees had been active professionally in the German Federal Republic, a few had had careers in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Conversations with this second group were extremely illuminating and at times poignant.

For one of them, the greatest source of dissatisfaction was not a shortage of equipment or materials or the inability to travel freely, but rather the feeling that he and his colleagues could have accomplished a great deal more scientifically under different circumstances. They felt helpless, caught between the many deficiencies of the GDR and the restrictions imposed on the GDR by the West. The net result was that they and their science suffered dramatically.

Some of these scientists suffered further after the Berlin Wall came down. The purge of those GDR scientists who were party functionaries was lamented by few. However, others who were not tainted politically were also let go. Several interviewees who had been retained noted that many GDR chemists who were as capable as their Western counterparts were nonetheless involuntarily retired. The restrictions imposed on them in the GDR meant that their résumés could not match those of their Western competitors. Furthermore, the commissions set up to award staff positions in the former GDR universities were composed solely of chemists from the former West Germany.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, which has been widely and justly celebrated, was one of the most important and hopeful events of the late-20th century. In the midst of celebrating, we should also remember those ordinary colleagues whose lives suffered "collateral damage" from this momentous upheaval.

Stephen J. Weininger
Brookline, Mass.

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