CHCMS Mission

The Commission for the History of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences (CHCMS) is one of the historical commissions of the Division for the History of Science and Technology (DHST) of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST). Further information may be found here.

The Commission was founded in 1997 as the Commission for the History of Modern Chemistry (CHMC) and held its first meeting in 1998. The aim of the CHMC was to focus interest on, and to create a framework for, research on the history of modern chemistry with particular emphasis on twentieth-century chemistry in its relationship to the biomedical sciences, physics, instrumentation, and technology. At the time of the 25th International Conference on the History of Science and Technology in Rio de Janeiro in 2017, the CHMC celebrated its 20th year of existence with a positive assessment of its action: the history of chemistry had re-entered the international discourse among historians of science and technology, and the CHMC was an active commission of the IUHPS/DHST.

Along with the achievement of its initial goal, the Commission also took the full measure of the reconfiguration of the disciplinary field of chemistry and molecular sciences in general through the emergence of new sub-disciplines and study areas and the merging of different practices and techniques focusing on a specific technoscientific object or pursuit (for instance, material sciences, nano-sciences and -technologies, biotechnologies, life sciences, etc.). This prompted a change in name and purview. The CHCMS covers classical areas of the history of chemistry as well as areas of the materials sciences (such as surface science, nano-science and -technology, solid-state chemistry, polymer science, electronics, semi-conductors, and catalysis), of the life sciences (such as molecular biology, genetic engineering, and synthetic biology), and of the environmental sciences. The Commission also stretches back to earlier times, as savants from the early modern period started to think of matter and its transformation in molecular or corpuscular terms.