David Nash@michael_w_busch @knud @mekkaokereke @lerxst @OldFartPhil @grumpasaurus Couple anecdotes from my life as an aspiring young scientist (late 80s/early 90s, major and Ph. D. in chemistry):
1. The undergraduate school I went to (small STEM-oriented college) had a foreign language requirement for admission. It had no requirements for specific language but said "preferably German".
2. UC Berkeley, one of the candidates I had for grad school in the early 1990s, either required or strongly recommended that its chemistry graduate students take at least introductory German.
In both cases, this was not because current research needed an understanding of the German language. Of course, by the 1990s English had been the dominant language in chemistry research for decades. It's because an absolutely enormous amount of historically relevant chemistry research, particularly in organic chemistry, was done by German researchers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Beilstein database, one of the premier collections of data about publications in organic chemistry, began in the late 1800s and did not publish information in English until the 1960s.
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