A look at man's place at the turn of the century
The drastic changes that have taken place in man's way of life in the millennium that is ending today result, in the overwhelming majority, from the progress of science. However, from reading newspapers, one gets the impression that there is an overwhelming majority of the opinion that scientific research is bad for man. The products of modern science, from nuclear reactors to transgenic tomatoes, from genetic identity cards to intelligent supercomputers, seem to many to be a real threat. A deeper understanding of the process that took place in the last thousand years is essential to release from these concerns.
Man has always wondered about the nature of the material universe around him. We still do not have a definitive answer to the questions about the beginning of the universe and the structure of matter at the subatomic level, and it is to be assumed that the physicists of the third millennium will devote considerable efforts to them. But the main achievement of the second millennium is a complete chemical understanding of the material world around us, including the phenomenon of life. The achievements of science make it possible to describe how atoms of different types react to each other and organize themselves in space to create objects, from planets and limestone rocks to pine trees and fruit flies. This is first and foremost the victory of chemistry over all its branches, from physical chemistry and mineralogy to biological chemistry and genetic engineering. In 2000, we reached the end of the path outlined by Democritus, the father of the atomic theory, as described in the wonderful poem "On the Nature of the Universe" by the Roman poet Lucretius of the first century BC. In the millennium of chemistry we were able to explain the whole with the help of its atomic parts. Mendeleev's periodic table contains about a hundred chemical elements, each of which has a different type of atom. The atoms, like Lego blocks, chemically connect to each other to form particles (molecules). A simple molecule, such as that of the alcohol found in wine, contains nine atoms of three elements - carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. A larger granule, of the sugar sold in the supermarket, contains 45 atoms of the same three types. For basic questions such as why alcohol is liquid and transparent and sugar is solid and white, what gives these two substances their different taste, or how sugar alcohol is formed in the fermentation process in the winery, the science of the second millennium found an almost perfect answer. But the chemical revolution, which took place mostly in the last quarter of this millennium, also makes it possible to explain much more complicated phenomena than the differences between alcohol and sugar. Today we have information that describes in detail the body of living beings, including man, as a wonderful and complicated chemical machine beyond imagination. In the third millennium, there is an overwhelming majority for the approach that states that all life phenomena can be explained as an infinitely complex "dance" of chemical separations. Furthermore, we have no proof of the existence of such "super-chemical" phenomena that feed the believers in the occult, from homeopathy to reincarnation. If in the 17th and 18th centuries the atomic compositions of simple substances such as oxygen gas and cooking salt were deciphered, and in the 19th century those of organic substances such as sugar and alcohol, which are slightly more complicated, the twentieth century witnessed a chemical revolution at a truly high level. In this century, the chemical structure of the essential components of a living creature - the proteins - was fully understood. The molecule of a typical protein, such as the hemoglobin that transports oxygen in the blood, contains about 8,000 atoms of five types: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. Protein is a magnificent chariot, and its complexity gives it new properties, such as the ability to gently bind oxygen and release it according to environmental conditions, or to precisely regulate the amount and action of a hormone. The understanding of the tens of thousands of proteins that make up a living cell is the important news of the end of the second millennium.
There is a great deal of symbolism in the fact that the last chords in the symphony of chemistry will be played in the year 2000. This is the year in which the reading of the complete sequence of the chemical letters that make up the human genome and encode all its properties will be completed. By reading the DNA sequence we descend to the study of the strand which is probably the largest and most complicated in the universe: a human chromosome, a volume of our genetic "encyclopedia", is a single strand of DNA containing about 10 billion atoms. Cracking its chemical structure requires highly sophisticated chemical tools, of the type built through centuries of scientific research.
A statement such as "there is nothing left to discover" is always dangerous. When the Scottish physicist Lord Calvin voiced it at the beginning of the century, it was only a few years before the greatest discoveries in physics, relativity and quantum theory. But as long as it is about understanding the chemical structure of the objects in the world around us, it seems that we have reached a sort of finish line in a long race, and it is appropriate to ask what such success brings in its wings. The winged economy of the future will be in the utilization of knowledge for the construction of new "chemical facilities" and the improvement of the existing ones. The first includes new exotic materials and structures, such as high-temperature superconductors, interfaces between electronic chips and living cells, and tiny machines that will be built using nanotechnology miniaturization methods. In light of what is known today about living cells and the creatures that are built from them, it seems that there is practically no limit to what can be achieved by creating new combinations of atoms. It is likely that in the next millennium we will also see machines that build themselves, similar to a fetus in the womb that is built by chemical forces alone. If a chemical entity, consisting only of particles and atoms, is indeed capable of developing the ability to think, self-awareness and emotions, there is no reason to assume that this would be possible only in the particular atomic configuration that has developed on Earth in four billion years of evolution. It is thought that similar properties will be found in human-made intelligent robotic beings based on completely different compositions of atoms. If they are built from Zorn chips and if from carbon-based organic ferrode arrays, it is expected that robots of this kind will equal the spiritual qualities of a human and even surpass him. And it is not impossible that such entities would also have the ability to self-replicate, so that the circle for the creation of man-made life would be completed.
On the front of existing improvement, a comprehensive system overhaul is taking place before our eyes. If in the past millennium and those before it, medicine was based on trial and error and the random discovery of plant or laboratory medicines, then in the next millennium thousands of medicines will be developed using completely new methods. Science has led to the discovery of the chemical code that frogs use to transmit information to each other and to create compounds with new properties. This is the "language of weak chemical bonds", in which principles of electric charge compatibility (similar to the attraction of magnet poles) are used in a mixture with a formal compatibility such as that between the pieces of a puzzle. One of the pioneers of this field was Linus Pauling, who won both the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Peace. The principles of this language are abundant, but sophisticated algorithms and the use of huge supercomputers will be required to translate the insight into practical language. The third millennium will be the arena where computerized drug planning will be possible, based on the universal principle that every drug is a kind of key to a protein "lock". At the same time, the biological chemistry of DNA will be used to create new tools for gene modification and gene healing.
Some consider the statement that man is a chemical being a grave insult. Many even see the whole chemistry as fundamentally negative and associate with it everything related to pollution and poison. Others treat the chemistry of life as a mystery that will never be fully solved. But these and these need the services of the chemistry of life every day: all the food items, cosmetics and medicines we consume are based on developments and considerations from the field of chemistry. It is appropriate that in the next millennium, instead of resorting to superstitions such as those that guide diet according to blood groups or hair growth with the help of idol ointments, we will try to build a real relationship of understanding with the chemistry that builds us. Almost all the chemical developments that will come in the next millennium will be for the benefit of the human race. Personal diets based on an in-depth understanding of the composition and genetic variation of humans, new agricultural products that will be created based on the decoding of plant genes and a revolution in our ability to fight diseases, which will result from the decoding of the human "chemical machine".
