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
“Chemicals” are composed of different chemical elements bound together into certain “molecules”.
Once you figure out what the molecular structure of a chemical is, you can try to find alternate ways of producing it.
For example, for centuries, people have used ammonia for cleaning and dying things, and it was typically obtained from fermented urine. But in the modern era, we realized that ammonia is just a very specific molecule of 3 hydrogen atoms and 1 nitrogen atom, and so we were able to figure out a way to make nitrogen and hydrogen gases react together to produce ammonia synthetically.
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