Lavoisier in the year one.The birth of a new science in an age of

Thanks to his prodigious intellectual gifts and aided by his self-made fortune and his accomplished wife, Lavoisier was at the center of the scientific world of the late eighteenth century. It was from that vantage point that he participated in the race to uncover the chemical processes involved in combustion. Observed by the international scientific community, Lavoisier and his chief rival, Joseph Priestley of England, both discovered oxygen in the process of their work. But Lavoisier´s theory of how chemical reactions work, supported by cutting-edge experiments on state-of-the-art equipment, swept away the last vestiges of medieval alchemy and ushered in the modern science of chemistry.