Publisher Noordboek, with permission
Publisher Noordboek, with permission
“We wouldn’t be here without molecules. Everything around us, from this pen and your smartphone to our bodies, is made up of these building blocks. That’s fascinating!” says Professor of Organic Chemistry Ben Feringa enthusiastically when I speak to him and his colleague Anouk Lubbe in his office at the University of Groningen. We discuss the book ‘Everyday Moleculen’, which Feringa and Lubbe, research manager of Feringa’s department, wrote to give the general public an insight into the molecular world.
The book is a collection of 180 substances that you might come across in everyday life. From food to medicines and from textiles to insects and even your own body – everything is covered. “We thought people would love to know more about things they already know and come across every day,” Lubbe says. “And there is plenty of interesting things to say about the substances in a plastic bag, your phone or tea. Pure tea, for example, contains just as much caffeine as coffee, but the substance L-theanine ensures that your body still relaxes when drinking tea.”
‘Everyday Molecules’ will be presented on 15 September in NEMO. Here Jim Jansen, editor-in-chief of New Scientist, will interview both authors and Minister Dijkgraaf will receive the first copy. You can register via this website.
Why did you decide to write this book?
Feringa: “I see a lot of books about stars or biology, but not much has been written about chemistry yet. And that while the world of molecules is at least as interesting and exciting as the universe or nature, and certainly just as beautiful. Why is there a book about stars that are far away from us, and not a book about molecules that we hold in our hands every day? I wanted to convey my fascination for this wonderful world to a wider audience, and show them how cool all these fabrics really are.”
Lubbe: “For us chemists, molecules are very normal things, and we are used to the fact that everything we use every day is made up of these building blocks. But a lot of people don’t realize this, so we hope to lift a corner of the veil with this book and share our enthusiasm.”
Why should people read more about this world?
Lubbe: “I notice that many people don’t know much about chemistry, or maybe even find it dirty or scary. And that while it is such an important part of our daily life! With this book, maybe we can make people see that molecules are not far from their bed show, but that their bed is just made of molecules. And that those substances are not scary at all, but rather useful.”
Feringa: “I also think that the stories we tell will fascinate many people. In any case, that was our goal: to tell interesting stories, and thus teach the readers something about why their shirts are red or blue, why something tastes sweet or sour and what makes your mattress hard or soft. The latter is due to the properties of polyurethane, a polymer that you can use to make a foam. If you ensure that the foam contains large bubbles, your mattress will be soft, and with small bubbles it will be hard.”
What do you find so fascinating about molecules?
Feringa: “What fascinates me most is that you can make so many different things with relatively few building blocks. Take amino acids for example. There are twenty amino acids, and together they make all the proteins you find in the body. Your DNA is also made up of few different atoms, but it still contains all the information that ensures that you can talk, write, move, that we reproduce and whatnot.”
The molecule of adamantane looks a bit like a diamond
“I think another special property is that the world of molecules is infinite. Someone once calculated that with all combinations of atoms of a molecule the size of penicillin you can build more molecules than there are particles in the universe. And besides, they are just beautiful. Some fabrics are like a work of art. Take adamantane, a substance that can be found in petroleum and is used as a building block in the pharmaceutical industry. That molecule just looks like a diamond! And I absolutely love water. It seems so simple: two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, and yet I think it’s beautiful. Last summer I swam in a lake in Friesland, in the winter I hope to skate on that same water. Fascinating!”
Lubbe: “For me, the attraction lies in the fact that you can see what it does by looking at the structure of a molecule. For example, if I see that a molecule contains a certain amino acid, I know that it can bind to specific receptors in the body. Form is function, and you can then translate this into a material in which you use the molecule. As a chemist you learn the rules, and then it is actually very logical to see what a molecule does. And you can also use those rules, for example to make a medicine that fits exactly into the hole of a very large protein in your body and fights a disease there.”
“It also amazes me every time how many different functions one molecule can have. You often hear that things are bad for you, but in the end this is always a matter of dose. Even water will kill you if you take too much of it. And there are all kinds of molecules that were originally known as deadly poisons, but are now in very small quantities in medicines and cure all kinds of diseases. So I think that more knowledge of chemistry also shows you that things are not always so black and white.”
What is your favorite everyday molecule?
Lubbe: “I secretly prefer the weird molecules and poisons, such as taxol. It originally comes from the bark of the yew tree, but it’s now used in chemotherapy, and there’s a very nice story to it too. It is an incredibly complex molecule that is very difficult to imitate in the laboratory. It took chemists dozens of steps to make the substance, but they finally succeeded. Another favorite is, of course, DNA. That molecule is so elegantly conceived by nature that you can hardly match that as a chemist.”
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Feringa: “I like quinine. It was formerly grown by the Dutch in quinine plantations in Indonesia and has already saved many lives as a medicine against malaria, for example. But my absolute favorite remains water. Every person, plant and animal needs water, sixty percent of our body consists of it, and yet we have not yet unraveled all the secrets. For example, we see that the water on the surface of a lake, for example, has very different properties than the water below it, and we don’t know exactly why. That fascinates me immensely.”
Have you learned any new things yourself?
Lubbe: “We were already familiar with most of the fabrics we used, but of course you have to search for more information and you can always discover new facts and stories. For example, it contains an article about long chains of hydrocarbons that are attached to the legs of bumblebees. They appear to leave these on flowers so that other bumblebees know that the nectar has already been extracted. Super fun to learn.”
Feringa: “But we also had to make many choices, because we could easily fill another two hundred pages. Maybe that will come in another book someday, at least we have plenty of ideas. But first, ordinary chemistry has to be practiced again.”