The Importance of Organic Chemistry in Designing Novel and Enhanced Functional Materials

PABLO FROIMOWICZ

CURRENT ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBL LTD

Lugar: Oak Park; Año: 2013 p. 891 - 891

1385-2728

Organic chemistry established itself long ago as a stand-alone discipline and counts with a large number of scientific subareas, showing its multidisciplinary character. After a necessary evolution time of the individual subareas, organic chemists bearing different backgrounds started to interact fruitfully by exploiting complementary knowledge thus establishing the first interdisciplinary investigations across the different sub-disciplines. These interactions resulted in a synergetic collaboration among chemists, and also helped in facing greater challenges by those who were able to incorporate different backgrounds. Due to these intensified number of interdisciplinary works a greater and deeper knowledge on the studied subjects is achieved, pushing the limits much further to face every complex system and design unprecedented topics.The interdisciplinary approach, however, was not exclusively exploited by organic chemists, but also simultaneously by many other scientists in other disciplines. Currently, for instance, one of the most exacting and interesting challenges is to face smartly and in real time efficient multidisciplinary studies. The most appropriate manner to achieve it successfully is to carry out interdisciplinary research across different fields. In this way, more complex and sophisticated challenges will be simultaneously tackled from different perspectives and with a richer variety of tools and skills coming from the diversity of scientific backgrounds of the involved scientists. In a simple example, one could easily see how important the co-participation of chemists, biologists, physicians, and materials scientists is to form interdisciplinary teams addressing a vast diversity of topics toward molecular and/or nano-medicine.Organic chemistry sits on a very advantageous standpoint in the present context, since it allows many scientists to design, calculate and obtain the needed building blocks, as well as program their interaction (among themselves and/or with their surroundings) to generate new properties and/or functionalities into the final products and materials, which will be then exploited in the specific applications they were designed for.