Baltimore has a new national landmark: Remsen Hall at Johns Hopkins University.
The American Chemical Society this month named Remsen Hall on Hopkins’ Homewood campus a National Historic Chemical Landmark, making it one of about 100 places to have that distinction.
The designation puts Remsen Hall on a different landmark list than the National Register of Historic Places, which is determined and administered by the National Park Service after property owners, local governments and historical groups submit nominations, but it is also rare and prestigious.
The American Chemical Society’s program, launched in 1992, recognizes achievements in the history of chemical sciences in the United States, and the places where they occurred.
Remsen Hall was designated a landmark in honor of Ira Remsen (1846 to 1927), Hopkins’ first chemistry professor. A medical doctor as well as a professor, Remsen founded the first American chemistry graduate program at Hopkins 150 years ago and is perhaps best known for his co-discovery of saccharin in 1887. According to Hopkins, the discovery of the artificial sweetener was made in Remsen’s laboratory by Constantin Fahlberg, a postdoctoral fellow who worked in collaboration with Remsen but patented the synthesis on his own and gave it the trade name Saccharin.
A past president of the American Chemical Society, Remsen left his mark in the field of chemistry through the books and papers he wrote, his editorship of The American Chemical Journal, which he founded, and his former students, who went on to lead chemistry departments in other American universities.
Remsen also served as Hopkins’ second president from 1901 to 1913. He led the university during a time of transition, developing plans to move its Arts and Sciences campus from downtown Baltimore to its current Homewood location. Remsen Hall was part of that transition, constructed in 1923 and 1924 to house Hopkins’ chemistry department, with classrooms, laboratories and a 350-seat lecture hall. The American Chemical Society honored him when Remsen Hall opened in 1924, and his ashes are interred behind a plaque in the building.
A ‘true pioneer’
Hopkins President Ron Daniels and representatives of the American Chemical Society marked the designation during a ceremony at the building on Oct. 20.
According to the JHU Hub, the university’s in-house news source, Remsen was invited by Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, to establish the country’s first graduate chemistry program, complete with its first teaching research lab
“As noted by JHU President Ron Daniels, who spoke at the dedication ceremony, up until the founding of Hopkins in 1876, American universities offered little to no hands-on instruction” in chemistry, Claire Goudreau wrote in the Hub. “Instead, higher education was restricted to book learning and lectures. Remsen himself wrote his medical school thesis on fatty degeneration of the liver without ever seeing a liver or meeting a patient with the condition. But after studying chemistry in Germany, home to the world’s first research universities, Remsen realized that American higher education could be improved” and started the program at Hopkins.
Under his mentorship, Goudreau wrote, “American chemistry students were finally able to put the page into practice, ushering in a new era of learning.”
“Ira Remsen was one of modern chemistry’s true pioneers,” the Hub quoted Daniels as saying. “For more than a century, scores of extraordinary faculty have assumed his mantle, not simply transmitting knowledge, but creating it in the first place, audaciously advancing the frontiers of chemistry while training the next generation of researchers committed to pushing them further still…That is the legacy we celebrate today.”
“What we speak about today when we talk about modern education, focusing on the student — Hopkins was doing it all along because of Ira Remsen,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society and a Hopkins professor, according to the Hub. “He moved to Hopkins because he realized that teaching required practice, a laboratory, [and] that’s what Johns Hopkins has been for the last 150 years,” Hernandez said.
Founded in 1876
The American Chemical Society was founded in 1876 to support scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Based in Washington, D. C., it’s one of the world’s largest scientific societies, with more than 262,000 members. Its president, Hernandez, is the Gompf Family Professor at Hopkins. In addition to his work as a professor, Hernandez is the director of Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity, a program dedicated to creating more diversity in academia.
Other scientists and achievements recognized by the National Historic Chemical Landmark program include inventor Thomas Edison; Silent Spring author Rachel Carson; agriculturala scientist George Washington Carver; Leo Hendrick Baekeland, the inventor of Bakelite, the world’s first synthetic plastic; Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774; and Procter & Gamble for creating Crest toothpaste, the first oral care product to use fluoride chemistry to fight cavities, and Tide synthetic laundry detergent.
Also recognized by the program: the discovery and development of penicillin, the discovery of helium; the discovery of serotonin; the discoveries of Vitamin C and the Vitamin B Complex; the production and commercialization of aluminum, the development of the oil industry in Pennsylvania; radiation chemistry; occupational medicine and the scientists behind products such as Scotch Transparent Tape; Benadryl; Ivermectin; frozen foods; the dry cell battery; nylon; synthetic rubber and DayGlo paints.
Another Maryland landmark designee is the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where Marshall Nirenburg and his colleagues are credited with deciphering the genetic code in the 1960s. The U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Area Research Center was recognized for its discovery and isolation of phytochrome, a photoreceptive pigment in plants that controls their germination, growth and flowering.
In each case, the society designates a place associated with the individual or the discovery. For Priestley, it designated International Historic Chemical Landmarks in two places, the Joseph Priestley House in Northumberland, Pa., and Bowood House in Wiltshire, U.K. For Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent, it dedicated plaques at Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
‘First Chemistry Graduate Program’
Both Hopkins and the American Chemical Society are celebrating their 150th anniversaries this year. Remsen never worked in Remsen Hall, which was completed 11 years after he retired and three years before his death. According to the Hub, a plaque honoring “The First Chemistry Graduate Program in the U. S.” was unveiled on Oct. 20 and will be hung in the building later this year.
