from Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era, courtesy igloo heritage

When I went to Romania shortly before the downfall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanians (to judge by the displays in the bookshops) seemed to be a nation of stereochemists: for displayed to the exclusion of almost everything else in the bookshop windows was a volume entitled The Stereospecific Characterization of Isoprene. Perhaps the authorship, or the alleged authorship, of this volume explained its strange popularity: that of Elena Ceauşescu, Doctor of Science and Member of the Romanian Academy.

I did not know why the dictator’s wife had chosen chemistry as the realm of her supposed genius and world-fame. Nevertheless, I considered buying a copy, but then thought better of it. Surely any assistant in a bookshop would suspect me of wanting to expose it to satire, ridicule, and mockery on my return home? In a totalitarian society, participation in the cult of personality is easily interpreted as subversive, while failure to participate is tantamount to rebellion. In other words, where lies are the very lifeblood of the state, paranoia is inevitable.

I did, however, find one interesting book for sale in the bookshops: The Priority of N. C. Paulescu in the Discovery of Insulin.[1]The book maintained that it was not Banting, Best, and Macleod of Canada who made this discovery, as every medical student is taught and therefore knows for