A Rough Start for Organic Chemistry (pre-med students: I promise this won’t hurt)

Chances are, you’re not like me: you cringe when someone says the word “chemistry.” Your memory of it vaguely harkens back to an undergrad class whose knowledge you flushed once you finished the final. That’s okay — my goal for this series is to change that paradigm, make it understandable to all, and provide some entertainment.

While Davy and Faraday were off farting around with voltaic piles and electrocuting themselves, there was still plenty of important work to be done, especially in field of carbon-containing compounds — that’s the modern definition of “organic” chemistry. But where did the term “organic” come from? And why is it associated with carbon?

Remember how badly the four classical elements threw chemists off the path (e.g., they led to the theory of phlogiston) toward truth? An analogous theory (called “vitalism”) prevailed with compounds that were isolated from living plants and animals — it stated that those “organic” compounds could only be produced by livings things and therefore could not be synthesized from scratch (using elements). To clarify, let’s take soap as an example, which was made from animal fat at the time. Chemists theorized that the compounds in animal fat could be manipulated by humans, but they could never be made by humans because it took a mysterious “life force” to make them.

This was all proven false in 1828 by Freidrich Wöhler when he synthesized urea (a component of pee, which had…