West knew very early that he would be a scientist and by the age of 14 was working for a supplier making barrier metals to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. He analyzed the metal in his home lab, and successfully deduced the nature of this top-secret projectproduction of the atomic bomb. After taking a BS at Cornell and a PhD at Harvard, he became a very successful research chemist, specializing in organosilicon chemistry and receiving an award from the American Chemical Society for his work. During the same period, he climbed and named over 40 new peaks in Canada and Alaska, writing papers on glaciology and mountain exploration. Bob West is now a full professor in the chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is an intense man. Like many who achieve success through intense effort, he broadened his interests as he passed the age of 40 during the late 1960s. He became an officer of Zero Population Growth and president of the free high school in Madison; later, he helped to start a series of undergraduate seminars on science, man, and society. When the department chairman asked him, in 1969, to teach an honors section of the introductory chemistry course, he answered: Yes, provided I can do what I want with it, and spent the summer thinking, reading, and devising experiments for the course. The problem as he saw it was the narrow natu e of the standard introductory course and textbooks, and the exclusively research ethos of the chemistry profession, which did a fine job with the education of chemists, but neglected the nonmajor. West saw three possible approaches to chemistry for the nonspecialist: historical, philosophical, and environmental. Although the first two had certain advantages, they did not give the students hands-on experience with the way science and technology work in the twentieth century, and did not capitalize on a strong interest already present in the students. The environmental approach could do both, while enabling the instructor to express his own concerns about the bad effects of unbridled technology and the worsening reputation of science among the young. Thus, he decided to design an introduction to chemistry oriented toward environmental issues. At that time, only a few others around the country were considering such a course; there were almost no precedents, no textbooks, so that everything had to be designed from scratch. The course West put together is called for Mankind, and grew from its enrollment of less than 50 honors students in 1969 to a fall 1975 enrollment of 175. No longer just an honors course, it is a regular annual offering of the chemistry department, satisfying the college's breadth requirement for a lab science and serving as a prerequisite for those wishing to take further chemistry courses. In addition to relating basic chemistry to environmental issues, Chemistry 107, as it is now numbered, has introduced a successful new contract grading system. In Wisconsin's extremely large department (45 fulltime faculty), about 1,000 students a year still take the conventional introduction to chemistry, but West's course has influenced the content of these classes, as well as curricular planning on other campuses. His office has answered over 300 inquiries about the course. West assumes that the students know the language of simple chemistry and begins the course with a fast introduction to atomic structure and chemical bonding. Programmed texts a d assistance from teaching assistants (TAs) provide help for those ho have trouble, so that students with no previous exposure to chemistry can successfully take the coursethey just have to do much more work at the outset. The course then moves directly into four major blocks of study: • Water Quality: special properties of water, phosphates and eutrophication, measuring dissolved oxygen, etc.; • Organic Chemistry: fossil fuels, pesticides, soaps, polymers; • Biochemistry: fats and oils, carCHARLES I. SUGNET teaches literature at the University of Minnesota.