Organic Chemistry Quotes

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.

I remember being in strong physics, physiology and biology classes.

Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

As early as 1912, we worked on the problem of the hydrogenation of organic substances with the aid of highly compressed hydrogen.

Chemical synthesis is uniquely positioned at the heart of chemistry, the central science, and its impact on our lives and society is all pervasive.

I was going to be a doctor since I was three, so I was pre-med in college. Everything I did, every class I took, pointed toward the 'holy M.D.' Friends were taking wine-tasting classes, studying human sexuality, or redefining their views of the world in poli-sci, and I was memorizing anatomy and crying over o-chem.

My undergraduate, I double-majored in biology and chemistry. Biology was kind of my love.

I am the mild-mannered organic chemistry teacher at the University of Oklahoma.

Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.

People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?

As soon as chemists have a definite conception of the internal structure of the molecule of an organic compound, they are able to tackle the task of producing these substances by artificial methods, i.e. by synthesis, as we call it.

My father was actually a chemist. He got a degree in chemistry from Stanford.

Most commercial products that contain organic molecules possess at least one carbon-carbon double bond, or if one is not present, it is likely that an olefin was used in its preparation. This being the case, the potential applications of olefin metathesis are endless.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.

This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.

In 1967, I had formed a collaboration with Hermann Eggerer, then of Muenchen, and together, we solved the problem of the 'asymmetric methyl group' and applied the solution in some of the many ways that have proved possible.

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.

Nature works with five polymers. Only five polymers. In the natural world, life builds from the bottom up, and it builds in resilience and multiple uses.

But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.

It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.

I was in AP chemistry in high school, and I really liked it.

It is, I believe, justifiable to make the generalization that anything an organic chemist can synthesize can be made without him. All he does is increase the probability that given reactions will 'go.' So it is quite reasonable to assume that given sufficient time and proper conditions, nucleotides, amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids will arise by reactions that, though less probable, are as inevitable as those by which the organic chemist fulfills his predictions. So why not self-duplicating virus-like systems capable of further evolution?

I think chemists always think they know more than they know, because nature has a lot of possible pathways it can try.

My special fascination has been to understand better the world of chemistry and its complexities.