Chasing the Molecule: Discovering the Building Blocks of Life - Softcover

Buckingham, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0750933461 ISBN 13: 9780750933469

Publisher: The History Press, 2005

Synopsis

In the Fifties, a tremendous conceptual breakthrough was about to take place in science, revolutionising the way we think about the molecules of life. The story ranged across laboratories throughout Europe in which the protagonists built molecular models that promised to unlock the natural world's secrets. When the breakthrough finally occurred, some of the participants became widely honoured, while others were unjustly neglected and died in obscurity. This all happened in the 1850s, not the 1950s.

By the mid-nineteenth century, chemists had established that many natural products were made of just three elements - carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. How could this be true? How could such extraordinarily complicated substances, even man himself, be made of nothing but charcoal and air? The molecules were the fundamental substances of organic chemistry, the building blocks not only of the DNA unravelled a century later, but of the mass of natural products and synthetic substances that were to dominate the modern world.

About this title

About the Author

John Buckingham has a PHD in Chemistry and is editor of Chapman and Hall's a chemistry list on a part-time basis. A former lecturer in organic chemistry at London University (Westfield), he was the founding editor (and now consultant editor) for the only comprehensive database devoted to natural products.

Edition details

• Publisher: The History Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0750933461
• ISBN 13: 9780750933469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256