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
Consider a nice simple chemical – ethanol. We’ve known for thousands of years how to produce it biologically, by fermenting stuff, but that is what we call a batch process – you make up a big vessel of starter material, let it do it’s thing, extract what you want, clean it out, distill etc. Not as fast as it could be.
Instead, by knowledge of chemistry, we realised that we could produce the same ethanol by a synthetic route – hydration of ethene, a product from crude oil, as a continuous process – ingredients come in, react and come out without pausing at high speed and high purity.
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