What chemists want to know?

Here are some excerpts taken from an article that appeared in the journal Nature (volume 442, pages 500-502, 3 August 2006). The article talks about what questions are yet to be answered by chemists.

• Physicists do not shy away from promoting the big questions that drive their field — how the Universe began, say, or what governs the behaviour of space, time and matter over scales from the atomic to the cosmic. Biologists, too, are happy to point to Erwin Schrödinger's question 'What is life?', which they are attempting to answer by unravelling DNA and mapping out the structures and interactions of proteins. But what of the third basic science in the curriculum? To judge from the scant attention chemistry gets in the public media, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a discipline whose time has passed, its grand puzzles all now answered. Does chemistry have any big questions left?

• The strongly synthetic character of chemistry sets it apart from the 'discovery' sciences such as physics, biology, astronomy and the Earth sciences. "Chemistry creates its object," as the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot wrote in 1860. Many chemists still see this creativity as one of the field's strengths. "It makes chemistry able to set goals of a type most other sciences cannot hope to attain," says Ron Breslow, an organic chemist at Columbia University in New York and a past president of the ACS.
  

• The downside of this focus on making stuff is that chemists can be portrayed as inveterate tinkerers — tweaking the molecular world to satisfy their curiosity, sometimes for fun and sometimes for profit. And it makes it especially hard to see where industrial chemistry ends and academic chemistry begins, because important practical challenges provide the motivation for much academic creativity.

• No one would deny the importance of applied and industrial chemistry. But if chemistry's questions aren't so much about what we can know but about what we can do, does that make it a form of engineering — a quest for particular solutions to particular problems?

• According to inorganic chemist John Meurig Thomas of the Royal Institution in London, it is in the nature of chemistry to be a science of particulars. One can identify general principles of chemical bonding, for example, but what often matters is how these are enacted and modified in specific molecules.

• "I take the view that most of what is interesting in science is now chemistry," Whitesides says. He argues that even some of the key questions in a field as apparently remote from chemistry as astronomy, such as 'How many Earth-like planets are there?' or 'What is on Saturn's moon Titan?' are fundamentally molecular ones.

• Only chemists know how truly difficult it is to engineer atoms and molecules — something that many other scientific disciplines rely on. If room-temperature superconductors or synthetic bacteria are ever created, it will not be physicists and biologists who make them. And if chemistry is chopped up and parcelled off to other disciplines, there will be no training ground for those who achieve such mastery over matter.

  It would be wrong, moreover, to suggest that the heart of chemistry — rational synthesis — lacks intellectual appeal. Some argue that, rather than trying to understand the world, chemists are attempting to understand all possible worlds. "Chemistry has a useful aspect, but that is not the basic science," says Breslow. "The basic science is clear once we realize that the limited examples of molecules and reactions that nature has supplied are a microdrop in an enormous bucket compared with the wonderful chemical world still to be created and examined."

• "There is no Holy Grail in chemistry," Hoffmann admits happily. "Occasionally some are held up for public view," he says, but they are just "gimmicky candidates for the chalice". He adds that in a fundamentally creative field, the satisfaction comes from the chase, not the catch. "My natural philosophical disposition is not to work on big questions," says Hoffmann. "I like working on many detailed small problems in this wonderful chemical garden, while keeping my eyes open for the connections."

The six big questions of the field that some of the leading experts came up with were:

How do we design molecules with specific functions and dynamics?

What is the chemical basis of the cell?

How do we make materials needed for the future, in energy, aerospace and medicine?

What is the chemical basis of thought and memory?

How did life on earth begin, and where and how it might begin on other worlds?

How can we explore all the possible permutations of all the elements?