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O Mg!
A LIVELY, colorful graphic novel for How Chemistry teens and laypeople, Came to Be “O Mg! How ChemStephen M. istry Came to Be” is a Cohen ’89, ’92 fascinating, enthusiWorld Scientific Press, 2022 astic and humorous presentation of the history of chemistry from Greek times well into the 2000s. The book keeps readers engaged by including historical context from art, language, literature, politics, music and more — plus a few “Easter eggs” and plenty of dad jokes. Author Stephen M. Cohen might be uniquely qualified for this project, as he holds a doctorate in chemistry from Rice and has also been drawing cartoons since boyhood, including a comic strip in the Daily Pennsylvanian
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SUMMER 2023
while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. He also hosts a weekly podcast called The History of Chemistry. How difficult was it to draw a history of chemistry? Very, [especially] in regards to making it look historically accurate. For example, the photographs tended to be black and white in those days: 19th century. So, I had to research, if somebody was wearing a cravat and a jacket, what color might that be? If women were doing research — and pictures of women in the labs are more difficult to find — what would they have worn? If they spoke, I wanted to include one or two words of their native language, and I happen to like languages, but I don’t know every
language. There was also the apparatus to draw, so I’d have to go back into the literature and look for what that apparatus actually looked like. And then of course there’s the topic itself. How do I draw a particular experiment? How do I draw a chemical topic? How do I draw molecules moving around? All the research that you did makes the book tremendous fun to look at, because there are so many interesting details to notice on every page. Yes, that was deliberate. In some
