Chemistry · Ch 15 — Chemistry in Everyday Life
Introduction
Introduction
Chemistry is not confined to the laboratory -- it underlies the three basic requirements of everyday life: food, clothing and shelter, all of which are, at bottom, chemical compounds. Life itself can be viewed as a network of interlinked chemical processes. This unit takes that idea and follows it into four concrete, everyday fields: how chemistry designs the medicines we take (drugs and chemotherapy), how it shapes the substances added to packaged food, how it explains the cleansing action of soaps and detergents, and how it builds the polymers used in fibres, utensils, tyres and countless other everyday objects.
What this unit sets out to do. By the end of it you should be able to:
- recognise the terms drug and chemotherapy, and classify drugs based on their properties;
- describe how a drug interacts with its target, and discuss some important classes of drugs;
- explain the chemistry of cleansing agents, and describe the chemicals found in food;
- explain the important terms used in polymer chemistry, and describe the preparation of some important synthetic polymers;
- appreciate the importance of polymers in everyday life.
A short profile opens the unit: the Swiss chemist Vladimir Prelog shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John W. Cornforth for research on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Prelog worked broadly across alkaloids, antibiotics, enzymes and other natural products, and is remembered for driving forward modern stereochemistry -- synthesising natural products and untangling stereochemical puzzles in compounds ranging from adamantane-type alkaloids to boromycin analogues and rifamycins. The profile is a fitting opener, because several of the drug molecules discussed later act the way they do precisely because of their three-dimensional shape -- receptors are chiral, so two mirror-image forms of the same drug molecule can behave completely differently in the body.
Worked out. A short biographical box on Vladimir Prelog, the Swiss chemist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John W. Cornforth for his work on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. The box credits him with wide-ranging research on alkaloids, antibiotics, enzymes and other natural compounds, and with major contributions to the development of modern stereochemistry, including the synthesis of natural products and work on the stereochemical problems of compounds such as adamantane-type alkaloids, boromycin analogues and rifamycins -- placed here because several of the drug molecules discussed later in the unit are themselves chiral, and their biological activity depends on that stereochemistry.
~intro-prelog-box: Vladimir Prelog.