Aleksey Payevsky Appointed Editor-in-Chief of a New Chemistry Portal
The Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IGIC RAS) supported by Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education is working to create an online museum of chemistry. This undertaking is part of a federal project titled ‘Popularizing Science and Technology’ and the ‘Working with Experience’ Initiative, both launched under the auspices of the Decade of Science and Technology, which was announced in Russia in 2022. VYZOV Prize Scientific Committee Member Aleksey Paevsky will head the website’s editorial team, which will produce content for the online museum.
The Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry is the oldest chemical research facility of the Russian Academy of Sciences, dating back to the Academy of Sciences’ Chemical Laboratory founded by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1748. The lab’s 275th anniversary in 2023 was marked by the Kurnakov Institute publishing a book titled ‘Two Hundred Seventy-Five Years of Chemical Science in Russia,’ authored by Vladimir Ivanov, Aleksey Paevsky and Yuri Zolotov.
In the process of writing the book, its authors found out that materials on the history of Russian chemical science are hard to get, and some historic episodes remain practically unknown to the public to this day. It was therefore decided to create an online museum of chemistry to make the history of chemical science more publicly available. The museum will trace the development of chemistry in Russia, including the evolution of various scientific schools created by prominent Russian chemists.
The project is supervised by IGIC Director Vladimir Ivanov, a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Content production will be overseen by Aleksey Paevsky, Head of the Press Office with the RAS Federal Research Center of Problems of Chemical Physics and Medicinal Chemistry, curator of the ‘Working with Experience’ Initiative and a member of the VYZOV Prize Scientific Committee.
“Our project is in its nascent stage, and the amount of work we’ll have to do may take a few years to accomplish, but what we aim to create in the long run is a comprehensive picture of how the chemical science evolved, not only in Russia, but worldwide, since any scientific discipline is a planetary phenomenon,” says the online museum’s newly appointed Editor-in-Chief Aleksey Paevsky.
The online museum will feature various sections, such as:
- biographies of prominent Russian and international chemists,
- histories of discovery or research of certain chemicals,
- a new popular library of chemical elements,
- the history of chemical science narrated through a map of Russia (reports from chemical museums, science museums and memorial house museums of prominent chemists),
- the history of Russia’s chemical institutes,
- day-to-day chemistry: the history of various chemical devices, appliances, vessels and containers, their operating principles and their application in a modern-day chemistry lab.
The project also plans to create a ‘chemistry’ map layer in Yandex Maps, highlighting landmarks related to the history of chemical science.
The museum’s team plans to publish a full website guide in June, but certain materials will be available online starting from May 6th. You can follow the museum’s news updates on social media via VK and Telegram.