how can one simple chemical, like cyanide, be so detrimental to the human body, compared to just carbon and just nitrogen?

Question

I just found it so wild that our bodies are full of carbon and nitrogen (even if as part of other chemicals. We breath, what I assume, to be molecular nitrogen. But then slap a carbon atom to a nitrogen atom and you’re screwed. Why?

In: 27

Answer 1

Slapping that carbon on there creates an entirely different substance that behaves in an entirely different way compared to either of its constituent elements. A common similar example is table salt. Chlorine, highly toxic gas, and sodium, a hugely reactive metal… combine to make a white salt that we put on our food. Similarly, atomic nitrogen and atomic carbon are just meh. But, when they combine to make hydrogen cyanide, the resulting molecule like to bind with an iron atom on a particular enzyme in our bodies. When it does, it disrupts the metabolic pathway that depends on that enzyme, so that metabolic pathway breaks down, we lose the ability to extract energy from sugars, and we die.

TL;DR – chemistry