this week was/is national chemistry week with tomorrow being national mole day. (think about that one, remember avogadro's constant is ~6.02 x 10^23 mol^-1 and the date tomorrow is? think month day format).
the theme this year is health and wellness. this a particularly good theme for chemistry as most people associate chemistry with bad things like accidents, rather than good things like healthy living. yes, bad chemical accidents have happened but how does one measure the bad against the good. chemical manufacturing plants make things that are used later to make medicinal drugs, vitamins, food preservatives, fertilizers, protective materials, etc. and how many lives have been saved by things that we synthesize i do not know. is chemistry worth the cost? i think so.
one of the things that i find interesting to observe is the belief in natural medicines. there are many points i could make about these, but i would like to make just one point with the help of a specific example. if it were not for synthetic chemistry there would not be enough medicines to treat everyone that needs it, or if there was enough it would be gained at the expense of large ecological impact.
the specific example taxol. for those of you who don't know, taxol is a drug used to sucessfully treat many types of cancer. this can be considered a natural product in that it does occur naturally in the yew tree. however, if you go strip the bark of a yew tree and just crunch on that the effect is not good. the bark has several other constituents that are harmful and chemistry came to the rescue to purify the taxol to a form that is usable in patients. but that was the only hurdle that chemistry overcame. it is one thing to strip bark of several trees and obtain small amounts of drug for trials and quite another to obtain enough to treat the world's cancer patients. so chemistry found a way to use a chemical that occurs in higher quantities in the yew tree to synthesize taxol. instead of just using the bark off trees, now they can use much more of the tree and treat more poeple using renewable methods to obtain the drug. many people are alive (and living full lives) today because of this drug. we just wouldn't get that without chemistry and "not natural" products.
5 comments:
That is cool about the date thing :)
Chemistry is good for humans and trees :). I'm reminded of a phrase (?) I've heard in more than one biology class... about use of any and everything in nature for people although not always using but some what destroying.
Chemistry is good. I even like it more than physics. :)
good job jennifer...people need to consider things with a wider vision. bye the way, have you reconsidered your opinion about the effects of ddt? huh?
so let me get this straight.... chemists found a way to refine MORE of the yew tree to make the drug.. so doesn't that just make the drug MORE natural?
no it doesn't make it more natural. it means you start with something that isn't taxol, but it has a similar skeleton. then through SYNTHETIC chemistry you finish it off to make it taxol. so it is called a semi-synthetic drug. note that the only natural drugs are the ones isolated from plants without any human synthesis, even though chemistry is used to isolate, purify and/or package natural drugs. a synthetic drug can be a non-naturally occuring drug or a drug that occurs naturally but is synthesized by human processes. this synthetic process is what usually takes so much time for drug companies to perfect and is what is so important in patents. once a patent is up, the molecule and its synthetic process are now available to other people to use. now people who didn't spend any money to design the process or the drug get to make it and sell it as generic. it is exactly the same as the brand name, just no money invested in development.
bring on the generics!
I hope they cleaned their glassware before they made my generic walmart brand asprin.
Post a Comment