2011: International Year of Chemistry

By Bob McDonald, host of the CBC science radio program Quirks & Quarks.

Following in the footsteps of the international years of Astronomy, Darwin and Biodiversity, this year is dedicated to the science that has given us everything from Teflon to Tylenol. Interestingly, much of the focus of this year's celebration of chemistry is to try to clean up the worldwide damage that chemical byproducts have inflicted on the environment.

Unless you are sitting in a cave, wearing animal skins, take a look around you right now and you will see the products of chemistry everywhere. From the clothes on your back to the synthetic carpet under your feet, from ingredients in your food and drink to, of course, that most ubiquitous chemical product, plastic, our modern-day life would not be where it is without the wizards who have managed to cook up miracle products that have literally shaped modern civilization.
Beyond Earth, the chemists tell us what's going on elsewhere in the universe. Instruments on spacecraft or telescopes can detect chemical elements on distant planets or in clouds of gas floating between the stars. But it's the chemists who interpret those ingredients and analyse processes such as methane rain cycles on a moon of Saturn or reactions within interstellar gas clouds that form amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Even the Periodic Table of Elements, the fundamental face of chemistry, is being revised to more clearly define elemental weights. (You can hear more about it this week on Quirks & Quarks. It may not mean much to most of us, but it dramatically sharpens the tools that are used in forensics and pollution monitoring.

But as remarkable as the achievements of chemists have been, read through any environmental story and you will see chemicals of some kind involved in air, water and land pollution, whether it's pipes discharging waste into rivers, agricultural runoff contaminating shorelines, toxic fumes blowing out stacks, or just plain litter.
To the credit of the industry, many activities planned for this year are environmentally based, including a series of hands-on activities for young people, designed to look at water quality in their neighbourhoods and compare their results to young people around the world. After all, problems that involve chemicals in the environment need chemists to both identify the problems and propose effective solutions. (Hey, even the word "solution" is a chemical term.)
Chemistry often gets a bad rap because it involves unpronounceable names, complicated formulae and failed experiments in high school. But while most of us only have a basic understanding of the subject, we rely daily on chemical reactions to move us from place to place or calm a headache. And whether you think of chemicals as modern miracles or evil incarnate, try to imagine living your life without them. For starters, you wouldn't be reading this column on your computer, because your computer wouldn't exist.So this year, whether chemistry is your thing or not, try to take in some of the events that will be staged at science centres and universities, or set up your own event, such as a river or shoreline cleanup. There are even Chemistry Olympics. So here's to chemistry - the basis of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere, too.