Art in Science?

Here are two manuscript pages from articles I’ve written. And there are the ways they appeared in print, in the Journal of the Chemical Society: Dalton Transactions and Inorganic Chemistry, two magazines you are unlikely to have read recently. The context of these images is the following: I’m a theoretical chemist. What you see is the initial draft and final printed version of fragments from two of the >500 articles I’ve written. Articles are the stock-in-trade of the professional scientist. By and large we do not write books; our achievements, such as they may be, are judged by these scholarly articles. In general they’re written in English (well, really in a jargon that has some vague relationship to English), printed in journals with limited circulation (these, among the world’s best chemistry journals, have circulations near five thousand each), glanced at only by other chemists, and read carefully by a few hundred people. On the basis of these articles my work is evaluated and I make a living. That explains circumstantially Figure 19-2, the final printed pages. What about the manuscripts, Figure 19-1? Clearly these are collages. There are samples of writing in two hands on them; one is my own, the other that of the graduate student (David Hoffman) or postdoctoral fellow (Kazuyuki Tatsumi) who has worked with me on this research. In science there is much, much collaboration. My papers typically have two or three coauthors. I pose the question, my coworkers and I discuss an approach to a solution, they do most of the tough work, we talk further, a presentation of intermediate results is made, they’re off to test various unreasonable suggestions I make, they write a draft, and I revise it into a final paper. In what you see in Figures 19-1 and 19-2, each a page of the manuscript of the final paper, I’ve pasted in photocopies of a piece of my collaborator’s draft that I decided to keep. The actual drawings that the scientific journals print are reproduced from India ink originals on tracing paper. These are masterfully done by Jane Jorgensen and Elisabeth Fields, two illustrators who worked with me for many years.