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Organic Chemistry 12th Edition



Organic Chemistry 12th Edition PDF

Author: T. W. Graham Solomons

Publisher: Wiley

Genres:

Publish Date: January 20, 2016

ISBN-10: 1118875761

Pages: 1200

File Type: PDF

Language: English

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Book Preface

Organic chemistry plays a role in all aspects of our lives, from the clothing we wear, to the pixels of our television and computer screens, to preservatives in food, to the inks that color the pages of this book. If you take the time to under-stand organic chemistry, to learn its overall logic, then you will truly have the power to change society. Indeed, organic chemistry provides the power to synthesize new drugs, to engineer molecules that can make computer processors run more quickly, to understand why grilled meat can cause cancer and how its effects can be combated, and to design ways to knock the calories out of sugar while still making food taste deliciously sweet. It can explain biochemical processes like aging, neural functioning, and cardiac arrest, and show how we can prolong and improve life. It can do almost anything.

IN THIS CHAPTER WE WILL CONSIDER:

• what kinds of atoms make up organic molecules
• the principles that determine how the atoms in organic molecules are bound together
• how best to depict organic molecules

[ WHY DO THESE TOPICS MATTER? ] At the end of the chapter, we will see how some of the unique organic structures that nature has woven together possess amazing properties that we can harness to aid human health.

LIFE AND THE CHEMISTRY OF CARBON COMPOUNDS—WE ARE STARDUST

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of compounds that contain the element carbon. If a compound does not contain the element carbon, it is said to be inorganic.
Look for a moment at the periodic table inside the front cover of this book. More than a hundred elements are listed there. The question that comes to mind is this: why should an entire field of chemistry be based on the chemistry of compounds that contain this one element, carbon? There are several reasons, the primary one being this: carbon com-pounds are central to the structure of living organisms and therefore to the existence of life on Earth. We exist because of carbon compounds.

What is it about carbon that makes it the element that nature has chosen for living organisms? There are two important reasons: carbon atoms can form strong bonds to other carbon atoms to form rings and chains of carbon atoms, and carbon atoms can also form strong bonds to elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Because of these bond-forming properties, carbon can be the basis for the huge diversity of com-pounds necessary for the emergence of living organisms.
From time to time, writers of science fiction have speculated about the possibility of life on other planets being based on the compounds of another element—for example, silicon, the element most like carbon. However, the bonds that silicon atoms form to each other are not nearly as strong as those formed by carbon, and therefore it is very unlikely that silicon could be the basis for anything equivalent to life as we know it.

What Is the Origin of the Element Carbon?
Through the efforts of physicists and cosmologists, we now understand much of how the elements came into being. The light elements hydrogen and helium were formed at the beginning, in the Big Bang. Lithium, beryllium, and boron, the next three elements, were formed shortly thereafter when the universe had cooled somewhat. All of the heavier elements were formed millions of years later in the interiors of stars through reactions in which the nuclei of lighter elements fuse to form heavier elements.
The energy of stars comes primarily from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to produce helium nuclei. This nuclear reaction explains why stars shine. Eventually some stars begin to run out of hydrogen, collapse, and explode—they become supernovae. Supernovae explosions scatter heavy elements throughout space. Eventually, some of these heavy ele-ments drawn by the force of gravity became part of the mass of planets like the Earth.

How Did Living Organisms Arise?
This question is one for which an adequate answer cannot be given now because there are many things about the emergence of life that we do not understand. However, we do know this. Organic compounds, some of considerable complexity, are detected in outer space, and meteorites containing organic compounds have rained down on Earth since it was formed. A meteorite that fell near Murchison, Victoria, Australia, in 1969 was found to contain over 90 different amino acids, 19 of which are found in living organisms on Earth. While this does not mean that life arose in outer space, it does suggest that events in outer space may have contributed to the emergence of life on Earth.
In 1924 Alexander Oparin, a biochemist at the Moscow State University, postulated that life on Earth may have developed through the gradual evolution of carbon-based molecules in a “primordial soup” of the compounds that were thought to exist on a prebiotic Earth: methane, hydrogen, water, and ammonia. This idea was tested by experiments carried out at the University of Chicago in 1952 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. They showed that amino acids and other complex organic compounds are synthesized when an electric spark (think of lightning) passes through a flask containing a mixture of these four compounds (think of the early atmosphere). Miller and Urey reported in their 1953 publication that five amino acids (essential constituents of proteins) were formed. In 2008, examination of archived solutions from Miller and Urey’s original experiments revealed that 22 amino acids, rather than the 5 amino acids originally reported, were actually formed.

Similar experiments have shown that other precursors of biomolecules can also arise in this way—compounds such as ribose and adenine, two components of RNA. Some RNA molecules can not only store genetic information as DNA does, they can also act as catalysts, as enzymes do.
There is much to be discovered to explain exactly how the compounds in this soup became living organisms, but one thing seems certain. The carbon atoms that make up our bodies were formed in stars, so, in a sense, we are stardust.

Development of the Science of Organic Chemistry
The science of organic chemistry began to flower with the demise of a nineteenth century theory called vitalism. According to vitalism, organic compounds were only those that came from living organisms, and only living things could synthesize organic compounds through intervention of a vital force. Inorganic compounds were considered those com-pounds that came from nonliving sources. Friedrich Wöhler, however, discovered in 1828 that an organic compound called urea (a constituent of urine) could be made by evaporating an aqueous solution of the inorganic compound ammonium cyanate. With this discovery, the synthesis of an organic compound, began the evolution of organic chemistry as a scientific discipline.


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