The recipient of the 2025 Joseph B. Lambert HIST Award of the Division of the History of Chemistry (HIST) of the American Chemical Society is Seth C. Rasmussen.  Professor Rasmussen is a member of the faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND. 

The HIST Award is for outstanding achievement in the history of chemistry and is international in scope. This award is the successor to the Dexter Award (1956-2001) and the Sydney M. Edelstein Award (2002-2009), also administered by HIST. The HIST Award consists of an engraved plaque and a check for $1500 and will be presented to Professor Rasmussen at the fall national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, DC, in August 2025.

Additional information about the award can be found on the HIST website at http://acshist.scs.illinois.edu/awards/hist_award.php

Vera V. Mainz, Sec/Treas HIST Division (American Chemical Society)

HIST Award Biography for Seth C. Rasmussen (1966-)

The winner of the Joseph B. Lambert HIST Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry for 2025 is Seth C. Rasmussen for his historical scholarship and revolutionary efforts to create a vibrant worldwide community of historians of chemistry.

A casual perusal of Professor Rasmussen’s CV would reveal a typical academic chemical trajectory. He was raised in Washington State and received his B.S. in Chemistry from Washington State University in 1990. He ventured East to Clemson University to further advance his craft of synthetic chemistry with John Peterson and obtained his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1994.  He returned to the West at the University of Oregon as a Postdoctoral Fellow with James Hutchinson, where he developed expertise in semiconducting organic polymers and stayed on at Oregon as an Instructor of organic chemistry.  He joined North Dakota State University at Fargo in 1999 and is now Professor of Chemistry (2012). He spent his first sabbatical leave (2018) in Australia as a Fulbright Senior Scholar with the Centre for Organic Electronics in Newcastle.  He is very active in the Divisions of the ACS that deal with polymers, and with his local Section.

Seth became active in HIST sometime around 2001, particularly after a chance meeting during a graduate school recruiting visit at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. His Host was David Lewis (the 2018 winner of the HIST Award), and after spending most of dinner discussing the history of chemistry, they became fast friends and have blessed HIST ever since.  After a flurry of both individual talks and the organization of symposia, Seth was recruited to be the Program Chair of HIST (2008-2017). In this role, he stimulated great symposia, recruited an international array of speakers, and placed HIST firmly in the international community of the history of chemistry. Naturally, he went on to serve as HIST Chair for 2021-2022. 

Another fortuitous event occurred in 2010 at the San Francisco ACS Meeting.  Springer was hosting a social event at a local microbrewery, where Seth met Springer Editor Elizabeth Hawkins. While discussing the publication of books and journals in chemistry, the topic turned to history. This ultimately led to an invitation to help launch a new series, Springer Briefs in the History of Chemistry.  In addition to his own three contributions to this series, he has edited 21 others from its inception in 2011 to 2025.  Based on the success of this series, a second longer-form series, Perspectives on the History of Chemistry, was founded in 2019; 8 titles have since been published or are in press.  Seth continues to serve as Series Editor for both series and these additions to the venues for publications in the history of chemistry are entirely due to his efforts.

Seth Rasmussen is now uniformly respected in the worldwide community of the history of chemistry.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society, and was one of the second cohort of HIST Fellows. He serves on editorial and advisory boards of journals and represents HIST on various international bodies in the history of chemistry. 

In addition to all Seth’s “administrative” accomplishments, he has made major contributions to the understanding of the history of chemistry.  One of his areas of specialization is the history of glass.  There were glasses on earth long before there were humans.  Some of this material arrived from other regions of the universe.  Seth presented the early history of these materials in his highly popular monograph: How Glass Changed the World (2012).  The success of this work has led to an expanded and revised edition to be released later this year. He is now recognized worldwide as an important scholar of early silica glass.

Another of Seth’s areas of personal interest is ethanol.  It has been a part of human culture for thousands of years. His wide-ranging monograph, The Quest for Aqua Vitae (2014), can be viewed as required reading for anyone interested in this subject and was recognized with a Gourmand Award for the Best Drinks History Book published in Germany for 2014.

In addition to his work in the history of chemistry, Seth is a scientific leader in the field of conjugated organic polymers (semiconducting polymers capable of conductivities rivaling metals).  Thus, it is no surprise that he began contributing to the history of this field as well, becoming the first to fully document the history of these materials back to 1834. This combination of technical expertise and historical analysis characterizes all of Seth’s work.  His first monograph in this area is Acetylene and its Polymers: 150+ Years of History (2018). This was followed with a technical book on the chemistry of these materials in 2013 (which also included a bit of history) and a much more substantial history monograph The Origins and Early History of Conjugated Organic Polymers: Organic Semiconductors, Synthetic Metals, and the Prehistory of Organic Electronics (2025) is currently in production at Oxford University Press.

HIST is proud to award its Joseph B. Lambert HIST Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry to one of its own rising stars, Seth C. Rasmussen.

We are pleased to announce that the minutes of the recent Annual General Meeting covering 2023 have been published. The meeting was held on May 2024 via Zoom.

You can find older meeting minutes here.

The next on-line seminar of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be given by Professor Annette Lykknes (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Dr Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Science History Institute) who will present: Discovering elements in the age of radioactivity – two contrasting stories

This will be live on Thursday, 23 May 2024, beginning at 5.00pm BST (6.00pm CEST, 12 noon EST, 9.00am PST). The format will be a talk of 20-30 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of half an hour.
As with recent seminars the Zoom link can be freely accessed by anyone, member of SHAC or not, by booking through the following Ticket Source link:

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/society-for-the-history-of-alchemy-and-chemistry/t-rpdojdx

The seminar will be also accessible live on YouTube at https://youtube.com/live/D1w48_ba2tU

Most previous on-line seminars can be found on the SHAC YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/SocietyforHistoryofAlchemyandChemistry

Discovering elements in the age of radioactivity – two contrasting storiesAnnette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen In a forthcoming edited volume on the nature of element discoveries the authors explore the discovery histories of selected chemical elements. The case studies presented allow to problematize and explore the unfolding of discoveries, how they are reported and what stage is considered as the discovery as well as how predictions and assumptions on what could exist shape these processes in scientific and historical practice. In this talk, we will present two contrasting stories from the context of radioactivity research.The first one is what might be considered as well-known discovery histories, namely those of radium and polonium, the very first new radioactive elements uncovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. But the new radioactive elements proposed by the Curies had not even been separated from the mineral fractions in which they were detected, and the main means of their identification was neither the balance nor the spectroscope which were the accepted ways of detecting elements but rather their characteristic and unique radioactivity.The second story looks at retrospective assessment and assignment of elemental discoveries, focusing on four claimed instances of element 43, before it was produced by nuclear means with a cyclotron and acknowledged by IUPAC and the chemical community as technetium in 1947. Going back in time, historians and scientists identify several “precursors” of technetium and a closer look at masurium, nihonium, davyum and ilmenium provide an opportunity to reflect further on the nature of discovery by taking into account the context of narration.