James B. Conant award received Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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$109,197 as of 2023) 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. Much of his research, like his double thesis, combined natural product chemistry with physical organic chemistry. Based on his exploration of reaction rates in chemical equilibria, Conant was one of the first to recognise that the kinetics of these systems is sometimes straightforward and simple, yet quite complex in other cases. Conant studied the effect of haloalkane structure on the rate of substitution with inorganic iodide salts which, together with earlier work, led to what is now known as either the Conant-Finkelstein reaction or more commonly simply the Finkelstein reaction.  A recent application of this reaction involved the preparation of an iodinated polyvinyl chloride from regular PVC. A combination of Conant's work on the kinetics of hydrogenation and George Kistiakowsky's work on the enthalpy changes of these reactions supported the later development of the theory of hyperconjugation.Conant's investigations helped in the development of a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of acids and bases. He investigated the properties of certain acids which were many times stronger than mineral acid solutions in water. Conant christened them "superacids" and laid the foundation for the development of the Hammett acidity function. These investigations used acetic acid as the solvent and demonstrated that sodium acetate behaves as a base under these conditions.  This observation is consistent with Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory (published in 1923) but cannot be explained under older Arrhenius theory approaches. Later work with George Wheland and extended by William Kirk McEwen looked at the properties of hydrocarbons as very weak acids, including acetophenone, phenylacetylene, fluorene and diphenylmethane. Conant can be considered alongside Brønsted, Lowry, Lewis, and Hammett as a developer of modern understanding of acids and bases.Between 1929 and his retirement from chemical research in 1933, Conant published papers in Science, Nature, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society  about chlorophyll and its structure.  Though the complete structure eluded him, his work did support and contribute to Nobel laureate Hans Fischer's ultimate determination of the structure in 1939. Conant's work on chlorophyll was recognised when he was inducted as a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society on May 2, 1941. He also published three papers describing the polymerisation of isoprene to prepare synthetic rubber.Another line of research involved the biochemistry of the hemoglobin-oxyhemoglobin system. Conant ran a series of experiments with electrochemical oxidation and reduction, following in the footsteps of the famous German chemist and Nobel laureate Fritz Haber. He determined that the iron centre in methemoglobin is a ferric (FeIII) centre, unlike the ferrous (FeII) centre found in normal hemoglobin, and this difference in oxidation state is the cause of methemoglobinemia, a medical condition which causes tissue hypoxia.Conant wrote a chemistry textbook with his former science teacher 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 in 1932, Columbia University's Chandler Medal in 1932, and the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, in 1944. He also received the society's Charles Lathrop Parsons Award in 1955, for public service.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1924, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1929. Notable students of Conant's included Paul Doughty Bartlett, George Wheland, and Frank Westheimer. In 1932 he was also honored by membership of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.After some months of lobbying and discussion, Harvard's ruling body, the Harvard Corporation, announced on May 8, 1933, that it had elected Conant as the next President of Harvard. Alfred North Whitehead, Harvard's eminent professor of philosophy disagreed with the decision, declaring, "The Corporation should not have elected a chemist to the Presidency." "But," Corporation member Grenville Clark reminded him, "Eliot was a chemist, and our best president too." "I know," replied Whitehead, "but Eliot was a bad chemist." Clark was very much responsible for Conant's election.
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