Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life: An Exploration of Scientific Creativity

Antoine Lavoisier, the author of the revolution, also did much to estabish the foundations for the fields of organic chemistry and biochemistry. Here, Frederic Lawrence Holmes gives us an intimate portrait of Lavoisier's investigations, ranging over twenty years, from 1773 to 1792, on respiration, fermentation, and plant and animal matter. These studies, Holmes finds, were not simply belated applications of Lavoisier's established chemical theories, but intimately bound from the beginning to his more widely known research on combustion and calcination.