I'll give only a few examples chosen randomly from articles that I, as editor of the Journal of Chemical Education's "Products of Chemistry" feature, solicited from eminent chemists. These are illustrative not exhaustive. The relation to our health or wellness should be obvious.
Polymer production is the world's second-largest industry. After food-related materials, polymers comprise the largest U.S. export market. The American polymer industry is the largest employer of professional chemists and chemical engineers. Plastic films protect and keep fresh many of our foods, and containers made of polyethylene that can be heat-sterilized have become preferred materials for hospital disposable items.
Chemists have transformed chitin, the versatile polysaccharide biomass (material produced by living organisms) into filtration media for water and effluent treatment, dressings for burns, ulcers and skin infections, surgical sutures, contact lenses and glucosamine.
Losing Weight
Obesity is epidemic in our society, especially in children, many of whom have adult-onset diabetes. Chemists have developed weight-reduction products, margarine, reduced-fat foods and noncaloric substitutes for dietary fat such as Olestra. Chemists have synthesized noncaloric sweeteners from saccharin to aspartame.
Glass, made from sand, lime and soda ash, was first prepared about 3500 B.C. Since then chemists have developed myriad types of glasses. Glass was applied to produce lenses and prisms used in a variety of instruments. Such fields as histology, pathology, protozoology, bacteriology and molecular biology (really a branch of chemistry) could not exist without glass instrumentation.
Without glass, Robert Hooke, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur could not have seen microorganisms under the microscope, leading to the germ theory of disease, which revolutionized medicine. Without glass, cells and their division could not have been discovered, and genetics and DNA would have remained unknown. Glass windows allowed light to penetrate into houses making dirt more visible and leading to improvements in hygiene. Glass greenhouses improved the cultivation of fruits and vegetables, resulting in a healthier diet. And without glass spectacles, most of us over the age of 50 would not be able to read this article.
Cheers!
All life is an incredibly complex network of biochemical reactions. Our health and metabolism are sustained by ingestion of foods. Because of their highly perishable nature, vegetables such as cabbage, cucumbers and olives have been preserved by fermentation since earliest times. Fermented vegetable products form a dietary staple of many cultures, such as kimchi in the Orient.
Fermentation products like cheese, bread, beer and wine, constitute some of the earliest applications of chemistry and microbiology to everyday life. Who says that biotechnology is a recent development? And the modern introduction of antioxidants to prevent the rancidity of fats and oils is an outstanding development of food chemistry.
Long before chemists began studying nature's chemicals and the living creatures that synthesize them, humans were making extracts, tinctures and medicines from plants and animals. More recently, chemists have produced a host of drugs, vitamins, antibiotics and food additives and preservatives from natural products. They have outdone nature in producing incredibly potent substances that leave the natural sources far behind.
Some of these were accidental or serendipitous discoveries, but now that the role of enzymes (proteins that catalyze biochemical reactions) are known, this research is much more efficient and closely targeted.
Chemists have even succeeded in producing fantastically complicated molecules from scratch, a process known as total synthesis. And combinatorial chemistry, a new, revolutionary approach to producing and screening pharmaceuticals, a field pioneered by my former student, Richard A. Houghten, is now recognized worldwide as an essential tool that decreases the time and cost of drug discovery as much as 100 fold. Another former student, Dwaine O. Cowan, and I devised a reproducible method for preparing cisplatin, the most effective and widely used anti-cancer drug.
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