From promise to practice
نویسنده
چکیده
The work by the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in the late eigh teenth century on the law of conser vation of matter and the oxygen theory of combustion helped to ignite a ‘chemical revolution’ that shifted the field of chemis try from observational studies to synthesis applications. The improved understanding of chemical reactions and the increasing ability of chemists to synthesize compounds ushered in a new era of synthetic chem istry that helped to drastically improve quality of life through synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, medicines, plastics and dyes and that spawned new industries on which many nations built their modern econo mies. Today, the emerging field of synthetic biology finds itself at a similar precipice: it has the potential to repeat the successes of chemistry by shifting biology from a research field largely based on observation to a discipline that emphasizes design and construction of novel biological systems and organisms. Coming full circle with his tory, one of the first fields that will benefit from synthetic biology is chemistry. Although synthetic chemistry and the chemical industry have drastically improved human quality of life, they have also created massive problems in terms of environmental pollution, toxic waste and even endanger ing public health. The growing environmen tal awareness and the rising costs for the prevention or cleaning up of environmen tal damage spawned the concept of ‘green chemistry’, which is the design of prod ucts and synthetic processes that minimize or prevent the use and generation of toxic compounds and reduce requirements for energy and natural resources.
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تاریخ انتشار 2013