Nature through eyes of a chemist – how to make world a better place

Chemistry, source

Have you ever wondered how the world works? Why do we need food and water to stay alive, why do we fall in love, grow old and eventually die? There are millions of questions you could ask yourself and after all – isn’t the ultimate goal of the human kind to find out WHY. Why there is what there is. It’s kind of funny if you think about it – we are nature, so nature is just trying to explain itself. Is this even possible?    

In order to discover those things, I had one conversation with my brother Uroš  Todorović . His only and biggest love is chemistry. Why is world so special? He gave me his side of a story...

Uroš Todorović, private photo

We have made a lot of progress since the early times of alchemy, when people made attempts to turn a bunch of things into gold (this is called chrysopoeia), make themselves immortal (oh, the gold old story about the elixir of immortality) and cure all diseases. But alchemy wasn’t just a protoscientific practice, it was a philosophical concept – it took a lot of reasoning to rationalize nature and explain how things work. Modern science is a product of many years of struggle and ingenious people who made it possible to answer many of the question you could ask. And it is always satisfying when you come up with a way to explain something, just look at how thrilled this alchemist was when he discovered phosphorus (painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.):    

Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771, source

 Thanks to chemists, many diseases that took millions of human lives are no longer a problem, as the medication has been developed. But to develop a drug, you need to know what’s happening inside a human body when the person shows symptoms of a disease. You need to know the cause and chemistry that takes place in the body. As you read this, your cells are working very hard to provide you with energy and regulate a lot of biological processes, which is all a large number of chemical reactions that take place inside you. If something goes wrong, you could trace that abnormality down to the molecular level and find the cause and fix it. That is how drugs work. Let’s look at a simple example: antibiotic penicillin. Penicillin, source

 Oh my, you must be thinking! What am I looking at? At some point in life you took a course in chemistry, so just try to remember that molecules are just atoms bonded to each other in a specific way. Above is a structure of penicillin. The arrangement of these atoms in space is directly responsible for its biological effects. Penicillin is an antibiotic. First, let’s explain what antibiotics are. Antibiotics are drugs designed to kill bacteria. If you get infected by specific bacteria, you can get very sick and die. This happened a lot since antibiotics were developed. Chemists were able to find out how bacteria thrive and stop it. In the same way we grow (i.e. make new cells), bacteria need to do the same thing. Penicillin serves a purpose to stop this process by inhibiting chemical synthesis of the bacterial cell wall. Let’s look at it in action: font-family:

 The video shows how bacteria explodes when penicillin molecules are found around it. Amazing how powerful chemistry is, isn’t it? This is just a minute fraction of the knowledge we were able to comprehend through the development of chemical sciences, and here’s another interesting thing – not all chemical reactions happen at the same rate. This is crucial for the development of life. Human body is a fantastic machine in a sense that it has many ways to speed different processes. Things that speed up reactions are called catalysts. Here’s a nice example showing how reaction is catalyzed to a point that it emits light and looks fantastic: 

Nothing sparkly likes this (fortunately) happens inside our bodies, but the concept holds. Chemistry is indeed a fantastic way to describe everything. Stay tuned to find out a lot more and let’s answer some of the question we could ask ourselves. Feel free to comment, and we’ll make a text that uses chemistry to explain life. This was just a glimpse!

My brother and me, private pictures

Thanks for reading.
Hope you liked the text!
Expect more post on this theme!

STEEM ON!