Marcellin Berthelot
#6,438
Most Influential Person Across History
French chemist and politician
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Chemistry
Why Is Marcellin Berthelot Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the ThomsenBerthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis. Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"
