All Writings

For fifty years, the protein folding problem baffled molecular biology: predicting a protein's 3D atomic structure from its 1D sequence took months...

For seventy years, Landau-Peierls thermodynamic theory asserted that strictly two-dimensional atomic crystals could not exist at finite temperatures due to thermal fluctuations....

What if a crystal were ninety percent empty space, with internal surface areas large enough that a single gram covers an entire...

In 1983, Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Fraser Stoddart invented the mechanical bond—interlocking molecular rings without chemical bonds. In 1999, Ben Feringa synthesized the...

Organic chemistry is not merely analytical; it is an art of molecular creation. In the mid-twentieth century, Harvard genius Robert Burns Woodward...

Life is an informational process written in the chemical alphabet of nucleic acids. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin's critical X-ray diffraction Photo 51...

In the 1920s, chemistry was imprisoned by the belief that substances with molecular weights above a few thousand were impossible colloidal aggregates....

How does a living organism convert dietary calories into universal biochemical energy? In 1961, maverick British biochemist Peter Mitchell overthrew conventional dogma...

What holds two atoms together in a chemical bond? In the 1930s, Linus Pauling applied quantum mechanics to the chemical architecture of...

For forty-four years, Mendeleev's periodic table was arranged by atomic weight, leaving frustrating anomalies like argon-potassium and cobalt-nickel. In 1913, twenty-five-year-old British...