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00:00:45 Chemists study the elements,

00:00:48 how the elements combine to form compounds,

00:00:52 how the elements react,

00:00:55 what the properties of these elements and compounds are.

00:00:59 He wants to study the structure of these things

00:01:01 because how they act in the environment

00:01:04 or how they act in our body

00:01:06 depends largely on their structure.

00:01:09 So they study the structure of these things.

00:01:11 And chemists study the properties, what they do,

00:01:15 how they melt, how they dissolve,

00:01:18 how they act under stress.

00:01:21 A lot of different things.

00:01:23 And so they use matter, they study matter,

00:01:26 they test matter, they transform matter,

00:01:30 and they want to discover the underlying laws

00:01:33 which govern what matter does.

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00:01:40 As a biochemist, I have come to the conclusion

00:01:44 that life itself is a series of delicate balances

00:01:49 of chemical reactions.

00:01:52 To me, it's just the study of the components of life.

00:01:57 And it doesn't matter whether you study

00:01:59 those components of life in a natural system,

00:02:02 as I do in biochemistry,

00:02:05 or whether you take individual molecules

00:02:09 and study them in an analytical setting

00:02:12 or an organic setting or synthetic setting.

00:02:16 It's all the same thing.

00:02:18 They're molecules and they exist in nature.

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00:02:24 Atoms and molecules.

00:02:27 The basic building blocks of 92 naturally occurring elements.

00:02:32 The materials from which everything in the universe is made.

00:02:36 Molecules and atoms.

00:02:39 The world of the chemist.

00:02:41 Chemists understand how different elements combine,

00:02:46 delivering answers to questions that face all of us.

00:02:50 Energy.

00:02:52 Solar.

00:02:53 Nuclear.

00:02:54 Oil.

00:02:55 Coal.

00:02:57 How do we use our finite resources?

00:03:01 Population.

00:03:03 Feeding the hungry.

00:03:07 Can we grow more on less land?

00:03:11 Can what we grow be more nutritious?

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00:03:28 Disease.

00:03:29 Communicable.

00:03:32 Contagious.

00:03:33 Infectious.

00:03:35 Can germs, microbes, viruses, and cancers

00:03:39 be controlled or eradicated?

00:03:42 Can we concoct, fuse, and alloy new materials

00:03:46 to conserve and extend the use of those we have?

00:03:50 Chemists work toward achieving the possible.

00:03:54 Creating abundance from limited resources.

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00:04:03 Atoms and molecules.

00:04:05 Molecules and atoms.

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00:04:15 Earth.

00:04:16 Air.

00:04:17 Fire.

00:04:18 Water.

00:04:20 These were the unlimited resources of the Greek world.

00:04:26 The alchemists tried to create more,

00:04:28 but their crude science was laced with magic and mysticism.

00:04:34 It was chemists like Joseph Priestley

00:04:36 who began to formulate a model for a world

00:04:39 made up of 92 chemical elements that occur in nature.

00:04:43 Priestley and the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier

00:04:47 discovered that air itself is a mixture

00:04:50 and that one of its important ingredients is oxygen.

00:04:54 The same gas that helped provide the powerful propulsive punch

00:04:59 that carried mankind to the moon.

00:05:05 While he was getting there,

00:05:07 oxygen flowed through his man-made umbilical cord

00:05:11 and allowed him to work and think

00:05:13 and observe the Earth from a new point of view.

00:05:18 Other chemists discovered more elements

00:05:20 and learned how to use them.

00:05:23 Charles Martin Hall, a chemist from Oberlin College in Ohio,

00:05:27 showed the world how to extract shiny metallic aluminum

00:05:31 from the red ore in which it had been locked away

00:05:34 since the Earth was formed.

00:05:56 Aluminum.

00:05:58 It's light and it's strong.

00:06:04 Carbon.

00:06:18 Wallace Carruthers, a brilliant young chemist from Harvard,

00:06:22 began to work with carbon compounds.

00:06:25 In a decade, he gave the world nylon.

00:06:30 But Carruthers had discovered more

00:06:32 than one tremendously useful man-made fiber.

00:06:36 Nylon was one of chemistry's most successful ventures

00:06:40 into polymers, long carbon-based molecules

00:06:44 whose building blocks came from petroleum

00:06:47 and which became the basis for the plastics industry.

00:06:52 Petroleum is a mixture of large molecules.

00:06:56 Chemists learned to break these long molecules

00:06:59 into useful refined products like gasoline and heating oil.

00:07:03 Carruthers took the process in the other direction.

00:07:07 He lengthened the molecules using small molecules

00:07:11 made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.

00:07:15 He assembled larger and larger molecules

00:07:18 in the same way one might assemble tinker toys.

00:07:24 Many polymers, homopolymers,

00:07:27 are made up of the same repeated sequence of building blocks, or monomers.

00:07:32 But when chemists developed synthetic rubber during World War II,

00:07:36 they learned to chemically combine the ingredients of homopolymers

00:07:40 into copolymers, taking advantage of the useful properties

00:07:45 of two or more homopolymers.

00:07:49 More recent copolymers include

00:07:52 some of the many specialized plastics used in automobiles.

00:07:57 Polymers can be combined with another compound

00:08:01 such as fiberglass to make a composite polymer.

00:08:05 Products made of composite polymers range

00:08:08 from car and aircraft bodies

00:08:11 to lubricants combining graphite with a polymer.

00:08:15 Conducting polymers look promising for use in lighter batteries,

00:08:19 one of the key requirements for a practical electric car.

00:08:23 Early tests suggest batteries made of plastics

00:08:27 can hold three times more electricity per unit of weight

00:08:31 than present batteries.

00:08:33 And many of these plastics are made from coal products,

00:08:37 a more plentiful resource than petroleum.

00:08:43 Someday, perhaps in the next century,

00:08:46 the oil wells will run dry.

00:08:49 If we continue to burn petroleum as fuel for our homes and factories,

00:08:54 we will have less of it for the other useful products we need,

00:08:58 such as plastics, prescription drugs, and fuel for our vehicles.

00:09:04 We must look elsewhere for our energy supply.

00:09:08 We must look, as we are already doing, to nuclear energy,

00:09:12 the force locked within the atomic nuclei

00:09:15 of heavy elements such as uranium.

00:09:18 And we must find better, safer ways to use nuclear power.

00:09:23 We must look to still other energy resources

00:09:26 that will carry us beyond the time when Earth's oil,

00:09:30 natural gas, coal, and even the uranium

00:09:33 that fuels our nuclear plants run out.

00:09:38 We must certainly look more seriously to the sun,

00:09:43 our star, the great nuclear furnace

00:09:46 that has been pouring out prodigious amounts of energy

00:09:50 for billions of years.

00:09:52 The sun's energy is locked in trees and plants.

00:09:56 It's released from the food we eat

00:09:59 and when we burn wood, coal, or oil.

00:10:04 Chemists have helped harness the power of the sun

00:10:07 with the solar cell.

00:10:09 The cell directly converts the sun's energy

00:10:12 to usable power on Earth.

00:10:18 Solar cells have been used successfully outside our atmosphere

00:10:23 to power satellites and space vehicles.

00:10:27 Closer to home,

00:10:29 chemists are working toward a new breed of solar generators,

00:10:34 big ones, big enough to satisfy

00:10:37 some of the world's huge appetite for electricity.

00:10:42 The newest cells developed by chemists are in thin sheets,

00:10:46 like a roll of polyethylene film from the hardware store.

00:10:50 Solar arrays soon may cover acres.

00:10:55 Here in New Mexico,

00:10:58 scientists are developing systems

00:11:01 that can power an entire small city.

00:11:04 Systems of this scale can begin to relieve

00:11:07 some of the demand for oil.

00:11:10 The quest for new energy resources has mobilized science.

00:11:15 Now more than ever,

00:11:17 chemists work with other specialists

00:11:20 to solve far-reaching problems.

00:11:23 The chemist may conceive a new solar cell,

00:11:27 but then physicists and engineers are needed

00:11:31 to find new ways to store that energy for a cloudy day.

00:11:41 With the biologist,

00:11:43 chemists are studying ways to create fuel

00:11:46 from vast resources of plant life on Earth,

00:11:50 whether byproducts from forests

00:11:53 or specially cultivated kelp in the ocean,

00:11:56 plants are efficient solar collectors.

00:11:59 Converting this energy to a useful form

00:12:03 is accomplished by this anaerobic digester.

00:12:07 Bacteria feed on the plants and produce methane,

00:12:11 the same gas used for cooking and heating.

00:12:16 With geologists,

00:12:18 chemists study the underground gasification of coal

00:12:22 using knowledge of the complex

00:12:25 and varied organic compounds involved.

00:12:28 Here, geologists are making core samples

00:12:31 to demonstrate that all conditions exist

00:12:34 to heat a coal seam underground

00:12:37 and vent the resulting combustible gas to the surface.

00:12:42 One of the most hoped-for dreams of scientists and engineers

00:12:47 who search for new energy sources

00:12:50 is a plan to harness the same nuclear fusion processes

00:12:54 that have kept the sun shining for billions of years.

00:12:58 That dream moved a little closer to reality in 1934

00:13:03 when chemist Harold Urey discovered deuterium,

00:13:07 a heavy form of hydrogen found in abundance in the ocean.

00:13:12 Urey later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this achievement.

00:13:20 With deuterium, mankind may now be able to do what the sun does,

00:13:26 that is, force nuclei of those deuterium atoms together

00:13:30 at extremely high temperatures

00:13:33 so that they fuse, stick together,

00:13:36 and release tremendous amounts of energy.

00:13:40 Another way to achieve fusion

00:13:42 is to place deuterium and tritium inside a chamber

00:13:46 and raise the temperature and pressure

00:13:49 with magnetic fields and electrical currents.

00:13:53 This is the Tokamak fusion reactor at Princeton University.

00:13:57 Inside the chamber,

00:13:59 nuclear chemists are trying to sustain reactions

00:14:02 at 100 million degrees centigrade

00:14:05 and at extremely high pressures.

00:14:08 In time, such reactors may provide power

00:14:11 for public electrical utilities.

00:14:14 They will be safer than current nuclear power plants,

00:14:18 more reliable,

00:14:20 and will create fewer nuclear waste disposal problems.

00:14:25 If you want to go out and be excited

00:14:28 by the thought of learning about life

00:14:31 and about the world around you,

00:14:34 chemistry is a perfect medium.

00:14:36 I read an interview with a Nobel Prize winning chemist

00:14:39 who said, sometimes when you ask yourself

00:14:42 why you're in science at all,

00:14:45 it's knowing that when you walk into the laboratory in the morning,

00:14:49 by the end of the day, you may know something

00:14:52 that no one else has ever known before.

00:14:55 You may observe something that no one else has observed before.

00:14:59 You may understand something that no one has understood before.

00:15:03 Chemistry is basically very logical.

00:15:06 If you are a logical bent of mind,

00:15:09 if you want to make a discovery,

00:15:11 make a contribution to society,

00:15:13 I think you can do so very readily in chemistry

00:15:16 simply because there are a lot of discoveries to be made.

00:15:19 Because chemistry is related to our everyday life.

00:15:23 It's so closely related to science,

00:15:25 there's no way we can separate the two.

00:15:27 If you eliminated chemistry,

00:15:29 you'd be eliminating modern society as we know it today.

00:15:32 So if we hope to improve our situation,

00:15:35 if we hope to become a more productive society,

00:15:40 a more efficient society,

00:15:42 a more respectable society,

00:15:44 then we're going to have to have

00:15:46 efficient, productive, respectable chemistry as well,

00:15:50 right down the line.

00:15:52 And there's no way to separate the two.

00:15:56 People think of chemistry as isolated

00:15:58 or very different from their everyday life.

00:16:00 In fact, it's so interwoven that they don't even notice it.

00:16:05 I think as a scientist,

00:16:07 you become more acutely aware of your environment.

00:16:10 You're studying it. You're studying nature.

00:16:12 Okay, maybe it's a bacterial cell or a test tube reaction,

00:16:16 but it's still life.

00:16:18 And I think, at least I know,

00:16:20 that my consciousness of the world around me

00:16:23 has been enhanced by being a scientist.

00:16:25 I can look at a tree and appreciate it

00:16:27 from a totally different viewpoint

00:16:29 because I know how it works.

00:16:34 The chemist is a member of the community.

00:16:37 As a citizen, as an observer of the times,

00:16:40 the chemist can direct his professional abilities

00:16:43 to the tasks which need doing.

00:16:48 Food and people.

00:16:51 The balance is getting rapidly out of kilter

00:16:54 as the population increases.

00:16:56 And agricultural acreage gives way

00:16:59 to the sprawling suburbs and crowded cities.

00:17:03 What land is available must be made to produce more food,

00:17:07 an ever-present challenge for agricultural chemists.

00:17:11 They have already helped hold the line against hunger

00:17:14 by building elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen

00:17:18 into chemical fertilizers that assure bumper crops on land

00:17:22 that may not have enough of those vital nutrients.

00:17:26 But the competition among life forms for this food is great.

00:17:31 Producing food for us has produced more food

00:17:34 for insects, rodents, and plant diseases.

00:17:38 Pesticides, when properly applied,

00:17:41 selectively check pests with minimal harm

00:17:44 to plants and animals in the same environment.

00:17:47 The chemical controls have also nearly obliterated malaria

00:17:51 and other insect-borne diseases that once claimed millions of lives.

00:17:58 In large part due to the applications of chemistry,

00:18:03 life is not as short as it once was.

00:18:06 Life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, diabetes, tuberculosis,

00:18:11 and even some forms of cancer have yielded to medicinal chemistry.

00:18:16 Cortisone, aspirin, the sulfa drugs, penicillin,

00:18:21 and all of our antibiotics,

00:18:23 many of these are derived from natural materials.

00:18:27 Some have been created synthetically by the pharmaceutical chemist,

00:18:31 but often as one disease-causing organism is conquered,

00:18:35 a new organism evolves.

00:18:38 For this reason, new antibiotics are constantly being sought out

00:18:42 and grown or synthesized.

00:18:45 In the search for a new antibiotic,

00:18:47 the pharmaceutical chemist often makes use of tiny organisms or molds.

00:18:53 The mold is isolated and grown on a nutrient-containing plate.

00:18:58 The product it produces is tested against strains of resistant bacteria.

00:19:03 If it kills the bacteria, more mold is grown.

00:19:07 The antibiotic, the active chemical within the mold,

00:19:11 is separated further, purified, and chemically identified.

00:19:16 More mold is grown in the pilot plant,

00:19:19 where it is fed everything it needs to thrive and multiply.

00:19:23 The antibiotic is harvested, crystallized,

00:19:27 and made available to physicians of the world

00:19:30 in practical and useful forms.

00:19:34 That is how penicillin, tetracycline,

00:19:37 and most of the other antibiotics that have been developed

00:19:40 since World War II were made.

00:19:43 And for the human race, life has been better ever since.

00:19:50 The changing world, with its ever-growing population

00:19:54 and new technological sophistication,

00:19:56 has always placed and continues to place new demands on the chemist.

00:20:02 But the chemist never works from scratch.

00:20:05 Always, he or she is building on something someone else has begun.

00:20:13 For years, science had puzzled over the chemistry of human reproduction.

00:20:18 How do our genes convey skin color or hair texture?

00:20:24 It is from the DNA molecules contained in virtually every cell

00:20:29 of virtually every living thing.

00:20:32 This repository of information directs the cells' every activity,

00:20:37 including reproduction.

00:20:39 Variations in the arrangement of DNA's four chemical bases

00:20:43 dictate both what an organism will be and what traits it will have.

00:20:50 Francis Crick and James Watson, working with X-ray diffraction data,

00:20:55 were the first to describe DNA.

00:20:58 They identified its structure as that of a double helix,

00:21:01 like a twisted ladder.

00:21:03 Just the explanation was enough to win a Nobel Prize for Crick and Watson.

00:21:09 But knowledge of DNA's fundamental chemistry of life

00:21:12 was soon to be applied to many and diverse scientific problems.

00:21:18 Scientists have learned to edit the instructions for life held in the DNA.

00:21:23 They can insert new orders

00:21:25 through the use of controlled recombinant DNA techniques.

00:21:30 Editing means taking a gene from one organism

00:21:33 or synthesizing the gene

00:21:36 and introducing it into the genetic apparatus of another life form.

00:21:41 Thus, recombining the DNA.

00:21:44 Of the hundreds of recombinant DNA projects,

00:21:47 this one is especially promising.

00:21:50 These bacteria have received an artificial section of DNA

00:21:54 coded for the production of human insulin,

00:21:57 needed for the treatment of diabetes.

00:22:00 Now the bacteria produce large amounts of a pro-insulin hormone,

00:22:04 which when refined, performs exactly like naturally made human insulin

00:22:10 and is replacing an extract from animal pancreas now used to treat diabetics.

00:22:17 Among the many promises of recombinant DNA

00:22:20 is the control or elimination of mankind's worst genetically transmitted diseases,

00:22:26 such as sickle cell anemia and hemophilia.

00:22:30 In recombinant DNA research,

00:22:33 we are unraveling the mysteries of life itself.

00:22:38 Chemistry constantly builds on previously accumulated knowledge.

00:22:43 The chemist must have great quantities of information available in a useful form.

00:22:49 The American Chemical Society maintains the Chemical Abstract Service,

00:22:54 which summarizes millions of documents

00:22:57 detailing the work of chemical professionals from around the world.

00:23:01 And the need for information processing

00:23:04 has brought the computer to the lab in a big way,

00:23:07 where the chemist used to spend hours interpreting analytical results.

00:23:12 Microprocessors are now built right into the analytical device.

00:23:16 The chemist gets a printout detailing facts

00:23:19 it might have taken hours to interpret from raw data.

00:23:23 Data enhancement by the microprocessor

00:23:26 helps chemists discover minute details,

00:23:29 some of which are not willingly revealed by nature.

00:23:32 And the computer, as a computational tool itself,

00:23:36 is taking over the burden of record-keeping for the chemist.

00:23:40 Replacing warehouses full of past data,

00:23:43 the computer not only keeps information,

00:23:46 but can find it and display it in milliseconds.

00:23:50 To understand the complex habitat inside the internal combustion engine,

00:24:07 a computer simulation helps chemists reconstruct an environment

00:24:11 too hostile for delicate instruments.

00:24:20 Chemists at Bell Labs use other computer simulations

00:24:34 to understand how complex crystals grow.

00:24:37 These mathematical models allow the computer

00:24:40 to work through endless possibilities,

00:24:43 so that the chemist need actually investigate only the most promising.

00:24:50 The number of complex molecules chemists can build

00:24:53 with synthetic methods now available are so great

00:24:56 that to find a compound with the desired set of properties

00:25:00 by trial and error would consume lifetimes.

00:25:04 The volume of information available to the chemist

00:25:07 is growing exponentially.

00:25:10 As we learn more and more,

00:25:13 we must keep from being swamped by the information.

00:25:17 The computer will let us be selective.

00:25:22 Through chemistry and with the aid of such marvelous mechanisms

00:25:26 as the computer, the laser, the electron microscope,

00:25:31 amazingly sensitive analytical devices,

00:25:34 satellites and space probes,

00:25:37 we seek to understand ourselves, our world, our universe.

00:25:43 But ultimately, it is the curiosity and imagination of the chemist

00:25:49 that constantly forces the boundaries of the chemical sciences.

00:25:54 Yet, chemistry still proves to be an endless frontier.