Organic chemistry: The science of the chemistry of carbon compounds. A great deal of organic chemistry is about the chemical reactions of various organic compounds, especially those reactions that can be used for synthesizing organic compounds.
Catalysis: The capacity of a substance to speed up a chemical reaction without being consumed in the reaction.
Enzymes: Proteins as catalysts. Like all catalytic molecules, enzymes function by lowering the activation energy for a reaction. This enables products to be formed more quickly and reactions to reach their state of equilibrium more rapidly. Most enzyme reactions take place millions of times faster than comparable uncatalysed reactions.
Chirality: A symmetry property that is important in chemistry and elsewhere. An object or system is called “chiral” if it differs from its mirror image. Chiral objects relate to each other like a right and a left hand. The two different forms with different chirality are called enantiomers or stereoisomers. Nearly all of the physical properties of enantiomers are the same, such as melting point, boiling point, and density, but they rotate plane-polarized light in different directions; they are thus optically active. Even though chemists often say that chirality is tied to a certain part of a molecule (e.g. chiral carbon atoms), chirality is a property of the molecule as a whole. The presence of “chiral atoms” is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for chirality. Instead, chirality is fully tied to the symmetry of the molecule as a whole.
The Wacker process: Chemical process for producing acetaldehyde, developed by Wacker-Chemie in Germany in the early 1960s.
Ziegler–Natta polymerization: In the 1950s Carl Ziegler and Giulio Natta discovered a catalyst that facilitates the polymerization of ethylene, which was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Hydroformylation: Industrial process whereby an alkene reacts with carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the presence of a cobalt or rhodium catalyst in the formation of aldehyde.
Text Anders Esselin
Translation Donald S. MacQueen
Photo Magnus Bergström