In Philadelphia last week, a group of scientists busily polished what was, until recently, a rusty old science. Alchemy, the ancient pursuit of transmuting base metals into gold, has been absent as a focus of serious scientific inquiry since roughly the mid-1700s. So who could have foreseen that this once obsolete practice would enjoy growth as a topic of modern academic analysis? Perhaps Johns Hopkins professor Larry Principe, who declared, at what is believed to be the largest international conference on the history of alchemy ever held in America, that the field is in “flourishing health.”

Mr. Principe presided as chairman of the conference, while others such as Columbia University history professor Pamela Smith participated in various talks and roundtables. Ms. Smith, who studies science as a cultural practice, said that interdisciplinary scholarly interest is growing in this “capacious and flexible body of knowledge.”

“In the past, alchemy was at the heart of the investigation of nature,” Ms. Smith said. Early modern chemistry, she added, was an amalgam of the manual and the textual, and its symbolic language offered moral lessons tying heaven to earth. “This was the beginning of experimental science,” the communication manager of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Neil Gussman, said.

Alchemists made useful contributions to the practices of distilling and fermenting liquor, making dyes and perfumes, pharmaceutical innovation, and so forth.

The last international conference on the history of alchemy took place in Groningen, Netherlands, in 1989.

Why has the subject lingered in the annals of history? “One of the problems with modern life is chronological snobbery,” Mr. Gussman offered as an explanation. Those who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries, he said, were, “just as smart as we are.” While the breadth of information available to them was more limited than in modern times, “that doesn’t make them inferior to us,” he said.

“In the popular mind,” Indiana University professor William Newman said, “alchemy is lumped together with necromancy, witchcraft, and astrology. That misconception is based on a romantic view of the occult sciences in the 19th century.”

“There’s a whole range of currents and ideas that have not been taken seriously by the academy,” University of Amst erdam professor Wouter Hanegraaff said.

In the eyes of Mr. Principe and others, alchemy has now reversed its academic fate. “We and the subject are in a bit of a spotlight,” he said. “One of the great accomplishments of the past 20 years,” he told those assembled, is that today, “no one has to expend energy” convincing people that alchemy is interesting and worth researching.

Mr. Principe first drew attention to alchemy when he discovered a note by Isaac Newton relating to “the philosopher’s stone,” a theoretical way of turning gold into metal in the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library.The Chemical Heritage Foundation acquired the library in 2004.

The subject of alchemy began to enter mainstream scientific history once information about how many among the greatest minds of the scientific revolution, like Newton, Boyle, and Locke, studied the practice. And evidence of its growing acceptance in recent years can be found in the pages of the first introductory text for historical alchemy, “Distilling Knowledge; Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Method,” by University of Nevada at Reno professor Bruce Moran (Harvard University Press).

“From our perspective, to think of a scientist as being religious seems very strange,” Karen Marie Fitzgerald, a former science journalist who is writing a novel involving alchemy, said. “But at that time, Newton and other scientists pursued alchemy as a spiritual endeavor,” she said.

The topic of alchemy or alchemists also influenced related academic and artistic practices, appearing in literature by authors such as Chaucer and Goethe over the centuries. Its intriguing allegorical imagery enjoyed display at the conference’s art exhibition. And conference attendees even enjoyed alchemy-inspired music: A Baltimore-based ensemble called Arcanum performed music by Handel, Henry Purcell and various French composers.

Speakers included Marcos Martinón-Torres of the University of London, who discussed archaeological evidence regarding triangular crucibles, and Didier Kahn, a professor from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, who spoke about King Henry IV’s support of alchemy in France.

Mr. Principe, introducing a roundtable on directions and critical issues, speculated on the direction of the scholarly discipline in the next couple of decades. He stressed the need for publishing fundamental data and editing critical editions of important texts to pave way for more solidly grounded interpretations.

Alchemy, it seems, is fool’s gold no more.

gshapiro@nysun.com