Life Matters

摘要

Life is an old subject for chemistry and chemical engineering. It was organic chemist Emil Fischer, after all, who in 1915 used the term synthetic-chemical biology. Why did life matter to Fischer? Well, he saw biology partially as a question of how materials, specifically molecules, are organized. Fischer argued that the methods of organic chemistry should expand into biology, which they later did with the making of synthetic peptides, proteins, and enzymes. Add DNA, fast forward, and we've reached the 21st century.