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Я знаю правду! Все прежние правды - прочь!
Не надо людям с людьми на земле бороться.
Смотрите: вечер, смотрите: уж скоро ночь.
О чем - поэты, любовники, полководцы?

Уж ветер стелется, уже земля в росе,
Уж скоро звездная в небе застынет вьюга,
И под землею скоро уснем мы все,
Кто на земле не давали уснуть друг другу.

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Fiber 66, the original name of nylon, was developed in the 1930s by Wallace Carothers, a chemist working for DuPont (see Fenichell 1999). His discovery, which grew from a decade of research on the structure and assembly of long-chain polyamide polymers, should have been the capstone of his career, but instead was the catalyst to tragedy. Carothers, more a scientific aesthete than a twentieth century company man, became deeply depressed by the idea that he had discovered a material whose chief use seemed to be as a replacement for silk stockings. In 1937, a few days after filing his patent for Fiber 66, Carothers, just 41 years old, killed himself in a hotel room by swallowing cyanide. DuPont pressed ahead with the commercial development of Fiber 66 and, in a ceremony that would have been anathema to Carothers, dedicated the name nylon to the public domain at a Herald Tribune Forum in October of the following year. Stockings, of course, turned out to be just the first of a line of nylon products, some of which would surely have given Carothers great pleasure, including perhaps, nylon membranes for immobilizing nucleic acids.

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