James Bryant Conant - Chemistry Professor

Chemistry Professor

Conant became an associate professor in 1924. In 1925, he visited Germany, then the heart of chemical research, for eight months. He toured the major universities and laboratories there and met many of the leading chemists, including Theodor Curtius, Kazimierz Fajans, Hans Fischer, Arthur Hantzsch, Hans Meerwein, Jakob Meisenheimer, Hermann Staudinger, Adolf Windaus and Karl Ziegler. After Conant returned to the United States, Arthur Amos Noyes made him an attractive offer to move to Caltech. The President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell made a counter offer: immediate promotion to professor, effective September 1, 1927, with a salary of $7,000 (roughly equivalent to US$93,655 as of 2012) and a grant of $9,000 per annum for research. Conant accepted, and stayed at Harvard. In 1929, he became the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry, and then, in 1931, the Chairman of the Chemistry Department.

Between 1928 and 1933, Conant published 55 papers. He explored chemical kinetics, particularly the relationship between the chemical equilibrium and the reaction rate of chemical processes. Conant was one of the first to realise that while this relationship was sometimes straightforward and simple, at other times it could be quite complex. He investigated the biochemistry of oxyhemoglobin, and determined that methemoglobin contains ferric (Fe3+) iron rather than the ferrous (Fe2+) of normal hemoglobin, and therefore that, unlike oxyhemoglobin, methemoglobin cannot bind oxygen. He investigated superacid solutions, and used them to study chlorophyll. He also published three papers describing experiments in which he polymerized isoprene to create synthetic rubber.

Conant wrote a chemistry textbook with Black, entitled Practical Chemistry, which was published in 1920, with a revised edition in 1929. This was superseded in 1937 by their New Practical Chemistry, which in turn had a revised edition in 1946. The text proved a popular one; it was adopted by 75 universities, and Conant received thousands of dollars in royalties. For his accomplishments in chemistry, he was awarded the American Chemical Society's Nichols Medal, Columbia University's Chandler Medal in 1932, and the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, in 1944. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1924, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1929.