Date of birth: 23 September 1949
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Born in 1949, I attended highschool in Amsterdam (Waterlant-College) before enrolling, in 1966, at Free University (Amsterdam) as a student of chemistry and history of science. In 1976 I passed the "doctoraalexamen" (MSc) in both fields and turned to the history of science for a PhD, since 1980, under the aegis of the Centre Alexandre Koyré of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris. In December 1983 I passed the PhD under René Taton as formal 'directeur de thèse' (with Reijer Hooykaas), thanks to a research grant of the French Government. The dissertation covered the history of the concept of molecule until ca. 1800. A project aiming at a monograph covering that history until ca. 1925 was accepted in 1988 by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. As a research fellow of the Academy, then, I entered in the service of the University of Groningen. The first two years were spent in Paris to study source materials (Académie des Sciences, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Sorbonne, Arsénal, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, École des Mines, École de Pharmacie, École Polytechnique). The project culminated in 1996 when I passed the 'habilitation à diriger des recherches', again at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. The dissertation in question was subsequently completed and, in 2001, published in three volumes by Springer-Verlag France (Paris). In 2003-2005 an abridged and adapted Dutch edition came from the press of Verloren Publishers, Hilversum (NL). A globally meant English edition was published, in two volumes, in 2009 by Groningen University Press. It was realized through grants in aid of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (College Park, MD), the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia, PA), and the European Physical Society. In 2006 I was elected member of the History of Physics Group of the European Physical Society. Actually I am in charge of the *Collected Papers of Frits Zernike (1888-1966)* and of a *Biography* of Groningen's Nobel laureate (Physics, 1953).

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