Sinopsis
To stay alive, early humans must have been able to tell the difference between two kinds of materials in their world. “You can live on roots and berries,” they might have said, “but you can’t live on dirt. You can stay warm by burning tree branches, but you can’t burn rocks.” By the eighteenth century, scientists thought they had grasped the nature of that difference, and in 1807, Jöns Jakob Berzelius gave names to the two kinds of materials. Compounds derived from living organisms were believed to contain an unmeasurable vital force—the essence of life. These he called “organic.” Compounds derived from minerals—those lacking that vital force—were “inorganic.” Because chemists could not create life in the laboratory, they assumed they could not create compounds with a vital force. With this mind-set, you can imagine how surprised chemists were in 1828 when Friedrich Wöhler produced urea—a compound known to be excreted by mammals—by heating ammonium cyanate, an inorganic mineral.
For the first time, an “organic” compound had been obtained from something other than a living organism and certainly without the aid of any kind of vital force. Clearly, chemists needed a new definition for “organic compounds.” Organic compounds are now defined as compounds that contain carbon.
Why is an entire branch of chemistry devoted to the study of carbon-containing compounds? We study organic chemistry because just about all of the molecules that make life possible proteins, enzymes, vitamins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids—contain carbon, so the chemical reactions that take place in living systems, including our own bodies, are organic reactions. Most of the compounds found in nature those we rely on for food, medicine, clothing (cotton, wool, silk), and energy (natural gas, petroleum) are organic as well. Important organic compounds are not, however, limited to the ones we find in nature. Chemists have learned to synthesize millions of organic compounds never found in nature, including synthetic fabrics, plastics, synthetic rubber, medicines, and even things like photographic film and Super glue. Many of these synthetic compounds prevent shortages of naturally occurring products. For example, it has been estimated that if synthetic materials were not available for clothing, all of the arable land in the United States would have to be used for the production of cotton and wool just to provide enough material to clothe us. Currently, there are about 16 million known organic compounds, and many more are possible.
