Chemistry of Life course

There are many successful examples of courses that teach fundamental chemical concepts along with applications of these concepts. The Chemistry of Life course is reversed in that it first engages students through the theme and then teaches underlying chemical principles in order to understand the theme, in this case processes relevant to chemical evolution. The use of themes to teach chemical principles is a format that has been successfully used in modules developed by the NSF funded consortium ChemCotmections (/-i). 

The Chemistry of Life course incorporates active learning methods, including computational molecular modeling, simulations, experiments, and student papers and presentations. As described below, activities have been designed that use commercial software packages to enable students to visualize chemical and physical processes that influence and support life. 

The course. Chemistry of Life, appears to be successful in teaching fundamental principles in chemistry through the thematic focus of chemical evolution. Students seem to appreciate the role of chemistry in the origins of life, as well as in their own lives, and feel more confident about their ability to understand chemistry and complex scientific ideas. 

Moreover, the introductory chemistry course, along with introductory calculus, serves as a foundation course to technical careers. Unpleasant experiences in these courses or poor performance in them often results in the loss of these students from the future technical labor-force pipeline. Enhancing the appeal of these courses is a viable strategy for kindling interest in technical careers across the spectrum of student customers . For the many students who will not pursue technical careers, a materials-oriented chemistry course can provide a sense of relevance by connecting chemistry to advanced materials and devices that we increasingly encounter in everyday life. 

The New Chemistry is a set of six hooks intended to provide an overview of some areas of research not typically included in the beginning middle or high school curriculum in chemistry. The six hooks in the set—Chemistry of Drugs, Chemistry of New Materials, Forensic Chemistry, Chemistry of the Environment, Food Chemistry, and Chemistry of Space—are designed to provide a broad, general introduction to some helds of chemistry that are less commonly mentioned in standard introductory chemistry courses. They cover topics ranging from the most fundamental helds of chemistry, such as the origins of matter and of the universe, to those with important applications to everyday life, such as the composition of foods... 

Professor William McPherson, president of the American Chemical Society in 1930, said in his presidential address that he once asked a former student who had distinguished himself in the field of literature whether he had derived any benefit from his course in chemistry. The young gentleman replied that the idea that had helped most to frame his philosophy of life was the periodic law. He had been much confused by what seemed to him an entire absence of order in the universe ... 

Clearly this means a complete rejection of the fundamental Darwinian principle of common descent. Also, he rejects mutation and natural selection as the mechanisms that produced species. Is this view also contrary to the universality of biochemistry, and in particular the monophyletic origin of life, to which most biochemists today would subscribe Probably yes but of course if one assumes an absolute determinism, then the laws of chemistry and physics would produce the same products at each different start. This goes against the notion of frozen accident and the unique origin of the genetic code. So, there was never a time on Earth with only one kind of species, and the development of species was parallel rather than sequential. Of course all these ideas are substantiated by arguments and data - for these, the reader should refer to the original sources. 

In principle, it is not fair, or course, to approach a problem of prebiotic chemistry by using sophisticated techniques of present-day molecular biology, such as phage display. However in this case the particular research question was not the origin of life, but rather the question given a vast library of random polypeptide chains, what is the folding frequency The criterion utilized for determining whether a protein is folded or not was based on resistance to the hydrolytic power of proteases, with... 

No longer than twenty years ago, self-replication was one of those mysterious processes considered the monopoly of living matter. The fact that we are now able to achieve it in the laboratory means that we understand self-replication and selfreproduction in terms of simple rules of chemistry. In turn, this means that we have proceeded a step further in the understanding of the mechanisms of life. Of course, this is just one step, but it shows that conceptual and experimental progress in the ladder of the transition to life is advancing. 

While the primary readership of this book is the Pharmacy undergraduate students (BPharm/MPharm), especially in their first and second years of study, the readership could also extend to the students of various other subject areas within Food Sciences, Life Sciences and Health Sciences who are not becoming chemists yet need to know the fundamentals of chemistry for their courses. 

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