The Chemistry of Life

The Chemistry of LifeMark Twain, one of the most original writers, predicted a number of centuries before the modern atomic age that there would be chemistry as a scientific discipline. One hundred years ago this had not been predicted, but the reason for this prediction is that at that time chemistry was so unknown and undefined that when Mark Twain began to write about it, he knew it would be an important part of the sciences of the future.In his books, Mark Twain predicted that when he died, 'Science would teach all its study of the matter to the world, and Chemistry would alone keep itself pure.' As of now, chemistry has changed so much and advanced so quickly that the only remaining laboratory-type entity that can do chemistry on the molecular level is perhaps the atomic microscope. Science has made so many other advances in just the last century, so much more can be accomplished with chemistry if we use chemistry to its full potential.Carbon and the Chemistry of Life was writte n in 1899, one hundred years ago. It was written so succinctly that the reader has no trouble understanding it. It is a celebration of everything we know and love about the world, and it also reminds us of the fact that today's discoveries in chemistry are only the beginning.Of course, we are at the dawn of a new era of chemistry, the 'chemistry of life' era. To a non-chemist, chemistry seems simple and fun. We know that the world is full of products of chemical reactions, and so we can smile, wonder, and marvel at what we see.How we once speculated about the continents moving as the air cooled and compressed its contents to create the oceans and continents we know today is only part of the world's fluids. A scientist will explain this to you in a few minutes, but in the meantime, let's give a little love to the world we live in.As it is the case with everything else in chemistry, the appearance of carbon is not necessarily as beautiful as the story of a man who stood on the face of a mountain, saw the formations, and then thought, 'Gee, I wish I could do that'. It is a hard thing to understand, but carbon, like any other element, is always going to be the same. This gives chemistry a great deal of purpose, because chemistry is a scientific discipline based on observation, on the measurements of known quantities, and on experiments in order to determine the amount of each element present in the universe.If you're interested in science, your interest should be in chemistry, because science is simply one branch of chemistry, and all branches are branches of chemistry. And if you're interested in the world around you, then it's not enough to care about that chemistry, you need to care about all the chemistry in the world!