Spider-Man and Organic Chemistry

 

        I want to open this article with a question. How many of you guys are planning to watch the upcoming Avengers movie? When Doomsday was first announced, it obviously received a lot of attention online, which came with a lot of supposed leaks and probably false rumors. However, one leak, regardless of its veracity stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of popularity, reporting that the X-Men were going to invade Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man’s universe and attempt to destroy it, culminating in a conflict between the two. Oh, boy, when I tell you that people were ubiquitously in favor of Spider-Man, I mean it. All of a sudden social media was flooded with what can only be described as nothing short of pro Spider-Man propaganda, violently condemning the X-Men whilst praising Spider-Man as the hero of the age, a fictional character who makes us all want to be more spectacular, more friendly, and more amazing individuals.

        This incident reminded me of how important Spider-Man is to the general population, as probably one of the most culturally important superheroes of our day and age (if you don’t believe me, see how much Spider-Man: Brand New Day made at the box office). In this sense, Spider-Man is to the laity as carbon is to chemists. Before I delve into the specifics of what makes carbon unique, understand that carbon is the most well understood element of all time. In fact, carbon is so well-researched that it’s not quite wrong to claim that the goal of inorganic chemistry is to understand the vast majority of the elements on the periodic table as well as we understand carbon.

        All of our scientific understanding of what carbon is, its properties, and its significance is summarized in a single field of study you might have heard of called organic chemistry. Note that here, “organic” simply means “containing carbon,” not “organic” as in the foul (?) tasting foods your school likely serves, claiming that it’s “healthy.”

        Beginning our analysis of carbon with a rundown structure, carbon has 4 valence electrons, meaning that it can form four bonds. By observing the methane molecule (CH4), we can learn that these bonds are evenly spaced away from each other in a tetrahedral shape, where each point in a hydrogen atom bonded to a central carbon via a single bond. However, carbon can form double and triple bonds in addition to this. This is because of something called orbital hybridization, where the electron orbitals add, subtract, and interact with each other in weird ways.

        In the methane case, carbon forms a single bond with the hydrogens via direct overlap or a σ bond (that’s a sigma bond, for those of you still watching Patrick Bateman edits and listening to slowed/reverb phonk). However, there are also such things as π bonds, which are formed by close association between orbitals. These allow carbon to form the many functional groups that appear throughout all manner of molecules, ranging from the phenol group to the ethanes.

So… that was a lot, but why does any of that matter? Why does understanding exactly everything about one singular atom mean anything? To answer that question, advancements in organic chemistry and our understanding of carbon have given us a stronger understanding of life itself and carbon is a highly common element, forming the most basic foundation of everything that ever was, is, or will be, from the screen you read this on, to your brain, and to the planet we live on.

Isn't that beautiful?

• Opeyemi J., 11th Grade