Free The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

store than vegetable dyes. As Perkin soon discovered, its parent compound could act as a molecular building block for other dyes, a chemical skeleton on which a variety of side chains could be hung to produce a vast spectrum of vivid colors. By the mid-1860s, a glut of new synthetic dyes, in shades of lilac, blue, magenta, aquamarine, red, and purple flooded the cloth factories of Europe. In 1857, Perkin, barely nineteen years old, was inducted into the Chemical Society of London as a full fellow, one of the youngest in its history to be thus honored.
    Aniline mauve was discovered in England, but dye making reached its chemical zenith in Germany. In the late 1850s, Germany, a rapidly industrializing nation, had been itching to compete in the cloth markets of Europe and America. But unlike England, Germany had scarcely any access to natural dyes: by the time it had entered the scramble to capture colonies, the world had already been sliced up into so many parts, with little left to divide. German cloth millers thus threw themselves into the development of artificial dyes, hoping to rejoin an industry that they had once almost given up as a lost cause.
    Dye making in England had rapidly become an intricate chemical business. In Germany—goaded by the textile industry, cosseted by national subsidies, and driven by expansive economic growth—synthetic chemistry underwent an even more colossal boom. In 1883, the German output of alizarin , the brilliant red chemical that imitated natural carmine, reached twelve thousand tons, dwarfing the amount being produced by Perkin’s factory in London. German chemists rushed to produce brighter, stronger, cheaper chemicals and muscled their way into textile factories all around Europe. By the mid-1880s, Germany had emerged as the champion of the chemical arms race (which presaged a much uglier military one) to become the “dye basket” of Europe.
    Initially, the German textile chemists lived entirely in the shadow of the dye industry. But emboldened by their successes, the chemists began to synthesize not just dyes and solvents, but an entire universe of new molecules: phenols, alcohols, bromides, alkaloids, alizarins, and amides, chemicals never encountered in nature. By the late 1870s, synthetic chemists in Germany had created more molecules than they knew what to do with. “Practical chemistry” had become almost a caricature of itself: an industry seeking a practical purpose for the products that it had so frantically raced to invent.

    Early interactions between synthetic chemistry and medicine had largely been disappointing. Gideon Harvey, a seventeenth-century physician, had once called chemists the “ most impudent, ignorant, flatulent, fleshy , and vainly boasting sort of mankind.” The mutual scorn and animosity between the two disciplines had persisted. In 1849, August Hofmann, William Perkin’s teacher at the Royal College, gloomily acknowledged the chasm between medicine and chemistry: “ None of these compounds have, as yet , found their way into any of the appliances of life. We have not been able to use them . . . for curing disease.”
    But even Hofmann knew that the boundary between the synthetic world and the natural world was inevitably collapsing. In 1828, a Berlin scientist named Friedrich Wöhler had sparked a metaphysical storm in science by boiling ammonium cyanate, a plain, inorganic salt, and creating urea, a chemical typically produced by the kidneys. The Wöhler experiment—seemingly trivial—had enormous implications. Urea was a “natural” chemical, while its precursor was an inorganic salt. That a chemical produced by natural organisms could be derived so easily in a flask threatened to overturn the entire conception of living organisms: for centuries, the chemistry of living organisms was thought to be imbued with some mystical property, a vital essence that could not be duplicated in a laboratory—a theory called vitalism. Wöhler’s