Stimulating Concepts in Chemistry

Edited by:
  • Fritz Vögtle,
  • J. Fraser Stoddart &
  • Masakatsu Shibasaki
Wiley-VCH: 2001. 414 pp. $50, £29.95

Each discipline in natural science has a popular reputation. Biology concerns itself with life and is intrinsically fascinating; physics does something very difficult and unfamiliar; astronomy looks at far-away objects and provides amazing pictures; chemistry makes paint and is boring. For those of us who know and love chemistry, this last view is a painful one. Our opinion is quite the opposite: that everything that one touches or sees or tastes is chemistry — that, in fact, all of perceptible reality involves conversations among atoms and molecules — and that an appreciation of chemistry is an essential and endlessly engaging component of an appreciation of the world.

Occasionally, groups of us gather our strength and try to explain why it is that molecules, and their behaviours and idiosyncrasies, are so fascinating. These two books are the fruits of such endeavours. Although both books are efforts to 'explain' chemistry, they have different scopes and styles. Both succeed — in the style of many multi-authored collections — by assembling a collage rather than painting a picture. In looking at a collage, of course, what you see depends on how far back you stand. And in a collage, although the edges can be rough and colours missing, there is often a sense of vigour. Both books convey that sense of vigour for chemistry.

Stimulating Concepts in Chemistry is exclusively focused on organic chemistry and its borders with neighbouring fields, especially biology, materials science and chemical engineering. Its chapters are in the style of reviews in technical journals, rather than essays intended to give a broader view. It is not concerned with the philosophy of its subjects — more with their nuts and bolts.

Organic chemistry is currently in a phase of change and expansion. For a number of decades, it has been focused on the art of organic synthesis. Its accomplishments in developing synthetic pathways to natural products — the often staggeringly complex molecules that are the odd offspring of metabolism — have been some of the great triumphs of the discipline. The utilitarian rationale for this area of research was that it developed methods that made possible the synthesis of drugs, as indeed it did. It was also intellectually very interesting — a grand game of strategy and logistics.

It is striking that very little of this classical genre is represented in these chapters. Their authors instead represent four different groups striking out across the marches. One develops synthetic methods — that is, refines important classes of reactions or processes — and traffics across the busy border between chemistry and chemical engineering. A second designs and fabricates organic molecules possessing new kinds of function: as wires for conducting electrons, molecular-scale machines, antennae for collecting light or molecular sponges that selectively adsorb other molecules. The authors of these chapters are collectively in the vanguard of those who believe that chemistry is a natural centre for nanoscience, as molecules are, in fact, exquisitely engineered and eminently manufacturable nanostructures.

A third group focuses on the synthesis of molecules relevant to biology. The molecules they describe mimic, inhibit or modify enzymes — all of these are activities that will be increasingly important as biology turns from cataloguing the genome to understanding the proteins whose structures it encodes. A fourth group simply makes new structures — exotic constructions containing only carbon atoms, multiply branched and rebranched molecules called dendrimers, and molecular crystals with designed structures. Chemists have always enjoyed making new molecules, and these chapters are baby pictures of new members of the molecular family.

The New Chemistry: A Showcase for Modern Chemistry and its Applications

Edited by:
  • Nina Hall
Cambridge University Press: 2000. 493 pp. £30, $49.95

The New Chemistry is a quite different book, and is intended, I think, for a more centrist audience. It is more classical in its coverage: it has a broader scope within chemistry and includes more history, but is less concerned with trade at the borders between chemistry and other disciplines. Its contributions span the full range of atomic and molecular behaviour: from the search for new elements to the production of energy, and from discussions of the nature of metals to discussions of chaos. It is surprisingly unconcerned with the intersection of chemistry and biology.

Is its title, New Chemistry, an accurate description? Well, yes and no. The fact that the essays cover a wide range of topics suggests, accurately, that the traditional subfields of chemistry are amalgamating. Some of the subjects — the chemistry of compounds held together by weak physical interactions rather than by covalent bonds, molecular electronics, materials, the production of energy, processes far from equilibrium, surfaces — are probably all, for different reasons, in for long runs. Others, such as the synthesis of complex organic structures, the study of the chemical bond and the chemistry of inorganic ions, are so fundamental that they will certainly always be part of the field, but may not be where most of the students go. The virtual absence of contributions from areas such as biochemistry and environmental chemistry reflects the fact that every collage is made with the materials available, and some colours and textures are always missing.

So neither book provides a broadly accessible, poetic view of chemistry. Both require that the reader understands the periodic table and can interpret organic structural formulae. I will give my graduate students the reviews collected by Vögtle, Stoddart and Shibasaki. They provide an excellent, if idiosyncratic, view of new directions in organic chemistry — a field that has become actively evangelical, and is spreading the gospel of organic synthesis and synthetic nanostructures to all who will listen. Hall's book I will keep for myself. It covers a sufficiently broad scope that even those who have spent too many years thinking about atoms and molecules will find that its essays contain surprises. I will not trouble my wife with either: neither book is really suitable for explaining chemistry to those who are not chemists, although much of Hall's book should be easily understandable by other natural scientists.

Both books do a good job of describing chemistry to chemists in ways that catch the imagination. That is a good start in escaping the dread adjective 'boring'.