I was looking at a wikipedia page about a particular chemical and it said something to the effect of “this was originally extracted from a fungus, but can now be made synthetically”. What does that actually mean? I can conceptualise the process of extracting chemicals from organic materials, but when something is created synthetically the chemists do…what exactly?
In: Chemistry
Getting to an end goal in chemistry is a puzzle. You want xyz, how can I get there in the easiest way possible?
The answer depends on what you have at hand, and what processes you know of to manipulate the chemicals.
Maybe you have an organic compound that has a chemical abxyz in it, and you know of a process to separate (i.e. decompose) the ab from the xyz.
Or maybe you have the chemical x and the chemical yz, and you know of a process to combine (i.e. synthesize) them together.
The latter is creating xyz synthetically, which means combining two or more chemicals together.
As a side note, what made me appreciate chemistry is watching NileRed on YouTube. Here’s a video of him [extracting pure gold from gold jeweley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Kn-kIsVu8). I’m not a chemistry expert, so a lot of the details go over my head, but I think despite that, one can still appreciate the process and systematic thinking that is going on.
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