Candles, Cats & Chem 20

There is a certain fascination to a Chemistry Laboratory, a fascination that lies hidden somewhere in the rows of bottles, the smells, and the steam baths that gurgle and spout like coffee percolators. Students in rugged Chemistry 20 must sense it presence, for they are willing to trade a normal outdoor life for one of box lunches and laboratory pallor. They say that a good deal of this fascination is because of their teacher, Louis F. Fieser, Sheldon Emory Professor of Chemistry.

Were he a students, Fieser would be classified as a character, since he drives a sleek Jaguar convertible and breeds Siamese cats which be names after chemical compounds. But since he is a world famous organic chemist, his quirks--though legendary--leave him no whit less respected.

Fieser's personality overflow into every part of his life. In class he is the absent-minded professor who, to the amusement of his class, frequently loses track of ten carbon atoms in his blackboard equations. In his laboratory, he is a craftsman, who runs through experiments with precision technique. He wipes his hands on the white towel that perennially hangs from his hip pocket, he blows clouds of cigarette smoke toward his embryo compounds, and blanks his butts in a water faucet. Outside the lab, he writes books on arson and lectures in all parts of the world.

Fieser mixes business and pleasure in one big beaker. His wife, also an organic chemist, has a laboratory right next to his. She was a student in his first chemistry class at Bryn Mawr, where he taught after studying at Williams and Harvard. They have written six books together--a bulky Fieser and Fieser sooner or later adorns the bookshelf of every Harvard Chemistry major. The Fiesers are childless, but they own two Siamese cats. The elder cat was named "Syn K. Pooh," after Synthetic Vitamin K, which Fieser first synthesized; and the younger was named "J.G. Pooh" after Jellied Gasoline (now Known as Napalm), also developed by Fieser. "I wanted to name him Napalm, but the name was a military secret them," he says. Drawings of the cats grace the prefaces of all his books.

While Napalm was Fieser's most spectacular war-time discovery, it was but one one many. Reports on his war projects fill two volumes. Fieser developed a "comfort fire" for isolated troops, which he chauvinistically called the "Harvard Candle," a bomb to ignite oil slicks, christened the "Paul Revere" (because it works on land or sea"), and a number of other incendiary bombs.

So Fieser turned to less destructive research. At present he is trying to isolate from celesterol (a substance found in the human body) a companion substance that may give clues to the mysteries of cancel formation.

Chemistry 20 is Fieser's pride. He has flavored it with a touch of the secondary school incentive system, including an honor group and bonus questions on exams. At the end of each year, Fieser pits himself against the class in a laboratory technique competition. Although he never loses, he is always disqualified ("for singing in the lab or something") and it is always students who get prize books.

Although Fieser has taught Chemistry 20 for twenty-two years and "wouldn't think of giving it up," the laboratory is still his first love. "I try to work in my lab as much as I can," he says. "The curiosity of unraveling secrets, the satisfaction of finding something new--it's exciting to me."

As someone who has unraveled more secrets than, most, Louis Fieser should know.