2012/ From chemistry to energy

The United Nations had proclaimed 2011 the "International Year of Chemistry" and, in the past months we have examined the contribution of chemistry to the development, validation and preservation of medicine and a window has been opened on the world of sugars and their important role in the phenomena of interaction between cells. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 2011 went to Dan Shechtman, researcher at the Israeli "Technion" Institute, and has led to a furthering of his discovery of the so-called "quasi-crystals". Also on the theme of Nobel Prizes, it is impossible not to remember Marie Sklodowska Curie, who one century ago received the same honor for her work on radioactivity, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics some years previously.

Another hundred-year anniversary: the publication of the results obtained by Rutherford on the structure of the atom has been the occasion for the exhibition "Is the atom really invisible? Questions and certainties in science", curated by the Euresis Association and exhibited at the Meeting of Rimini. At the Meeting, the thought of one of the fathers of organic chemistry, Friedrich August Kekulé, was referenced. In the mid nineteenth century, Kekulé said: "Even if scientific progress will one day lead to a theory of the constitution of chemical atoms, no matter how important that knowledge will be for the general philosophy of matter, it will bring only small differences to chemistry. Atoms will always be the chemical building blocks".

Today, also thanks to the consequences of Rutherford’s experiments, the natural laws that hold atoms together in molecules by means of so-called "chemical bonds", using electrons to build stable bridges between atoms are understood. It has thus become possible to reproduce, in the laboratory, even the most complicated natural molecules and to synthesize new, completely artificial molecules that have never before appeared on the face of the Earth.

2011 was a year of celebration that allowed people to trace the successes achieved in more than two centuries - since the time when chemistry was decisively separated from the magical aspects of alchemy and the scientific method was taken on - and to remember the contributions which this science has given and still offers to the welfare of humanity. But is it a scientific path that has reached its end, leaving room only for new applications, or are there still areas of the natural world to explore and challenges to be met by chemists?