Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Bringing Chemistry to Life: From Matter to Man by R. J. P. Williams and J. J. R. Fraústo da Silva Oxford University Press: New York, 2000. 535 pp (including bibliography). ISBN 0-19-850546-9. $135. reviewed by Arthur Glasfeld
Bringing Chemistry to Life is the third volume of a de facto trilogy by Williams and Fraústo da Silva that describes their vision of the connections between chemistry and biology. The previous titles, The Biological Chemistry of the Elements (1991) and The Natural Selection of the Chemical Elements (1996) (1), when tied to this book, demonstrate a progressively more general approach to the subject. In the first work, the authors briefly laid out geological and physical rationales for the natural distribution of biologically important inorganic elements in a single chapter, which was followed by a few short chapters that set the chemical stage for discussing the relevant chemistry. In the second book, Natural Selection of the Chemical Elements, the early chapters of Biological Chemistry of the Elements are expanded to create an interdisciplinary tour de force, describing the web of connections between the physical sciences and the nature of life on Earth. The authors addressed the ways in which the availability and properties of the elements, coupled to the needs of living systems, have led to the chemical nature of life on Earth. Williams and Fraústo da Silva wrote Bringing Chemistry to Life to “explore the logic of the evolutionary progression from the primordial inanimate matter to the highest form of life we know about—modern man.” They present the principles of chemistry, familiar to any student in a first-year course, in an idiosyncratic but effective manner. A hierarchical structure is created for understanding cellular processes in terms of the most basic properties of matter. Readers familiar with The Natural Selection of the Chemical Elements will recognize the content and the organization of that book in Bringing Chemistry to Life. In the new book, however, chapter introductions and summaries take great pains to lay out the logical structure of our descriptions of chemistry. Chemical structure and reactivity are linked to a minimal set of variables (mass, charge, position, etc.) that find constraints through thermodynamic obstacles, physical boundaries, and feedback control. Frequent analogies to human constructions (door bells, refrigerators, etc.) show that the physical constraints acting on chemical systems are comparable to those of engineered devices. The text starts with the hydrogen atom, dabbles with the geological history of the earth and the functioning of prokaryotic cells, passes through the central nervous system, and ends with an invitation to the reader to apply the same logical structures in explaining the evolution of society. The authors are modest enough to recognize limitations to their
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approach, but they have largely succeeded in an ambitious synthesis of modern scientific knowledge in describing the natural world. That said, this book is not the be-all or end-all on this enormously complex topic. The authors’ approach is singular and provides a welcome perspective, but it is not comprehensive. Quantum chemistry is almost absent in this presentation, though it does receive a historical review in an early chapter. The details of molecular structure are generally given only brief mention, in favor of describing the properties and behavior of bulk matter. Occasional ruminations on the history of chemistry rob the presentation of momentum, and the hurried leaps through protein and nucleic acid chemistry are disappointing to me. However, there are other books by other authors that fill in these gaps. Williams and Fraústo da Silva provide a nice selection of references to accompany each chapter, and for those interested in a more structural approach to the emergence of biochemistry, Geoffrey Zubay’s book on the origins of life is now available in a second edition (2). Although Bringing Chemistry to Life is aimed at “graduate students and teachers”, there is really no reason that a topnotch student in general chemistry couldn’t take on this book as a summer reading project. The mathematics is minimal, and the authors take great pains in making their assumptions and conclusions explicit. However, the book is truly of greatest value to teachers. A recent article in this Journal described a nonmajors chemistry course that addresses the chemical origins of life (3). I’ve taught a similar syllabus to science majors in first-year chemistry and found the material to be readily adapted to that setting. Williams and Fraústo da Silva have created a text that nicely complements the typical chapters found in a general chemistry text, and their examples provide provocative material around which an instructor could readily generate a contextual motivation for the fundamentals of chemical reactivity. At a time when many publishers are supporting projects that foster greater coherence in first-year chemistry courses, Bringing Chemistry to Life may even prove to be an inspiration for future generations of general chemistry texts. Certainly, those unfamiliar with these authors’ earlier works should feel motivated to add this book to their personal or institutional libraries. Literature Cited 1. Reviewed by Kauffman, G. B. J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 1559. 2. Zubay, G. Origins of Life on the Earth and in the Cosmos, 2nd ed.; Academic: New York, 2000. 3. Schultz, E. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 1001.
Arthur Glasfeld is in the Department of Chemistry, Reed College, Portland, OR 97202;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 4 April 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
