Welcome to Science Alive!
Science Alive! is the Web-based educational outreach program of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It is designed to create and evaluate exemplary online teaching resources. Specifically, it brings to educators high-quality classroom and supplementary materials that connect the history and nature of science with chemical concepts taught in school. It does so by presenting and analyzing the lives of individual scientists. The first life examined is that of Percy Lavon Julian, an African American chemist who synthesized sex hormones and a treatment for glaucoma, among other achievements.
The National Science Education Standards and many state science standards of learning promote science through a historical approach. Science Alive! teaches that science is a human endeavor that relies on the acute observation of nature, curiosity about the world, cooperation, collaboration, and a disciplined process of reasoning, inquiry, and analysis. What distinguishes Science Alive! from other science educational resources is the emphasis on the history and heritage of chemistry and the molecular sciences, and the program’s multicontextual, multidisciplinary perspective. By focusing on a particular life in science, Science Alive! engages student interest and makes the science activities concrete.
The Percy Julian project is targeted at 8th-grade students. It encapsulates several of the underlying assumptions of Science Alive! It uses Julian’s biography as the starting point for the exploration of the nature of synthesis, the unity of matter, the professional responsibility to report results accurately, and the importance of reproducibility, among other important themes. Future Science Alive! topics will similarly illustrate chemical concepts that emerge from the life stories of prominent chemists in history.
Pictured from left to right at top (images are from the CHF Collections unless otherwise noted): Robert Boyle, Marie Curie (Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, University of Pennsylvania Library), Percy Julian (Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio), Dmitri Mendeleev (Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, University of Pennsylvania Library), Linus Pauling, Wallace Carothers, and Joseph Priestley.