CHAPTER 3
Chemistry and Life
To understand how nerve cells work—how they generate signals and
pass information from one cell to another—it is essential to introduce
a few basic concepts of chemistry. This subject, at least at the level
of basic concepts, is not difficult to understand, is fun, and provides
a remarkably useful structure for describing matter in general and
living matter in particular. In contemporary science, chemistry, the
word and the discipline, is derived from an older word and discipline,
alchemy. And alchemy, some say, comes from the Arabic al kamia, an-
cient name for Egypt: black-earth land—fertile land of the Nile River
delta—trich, creative, transformative.
Chemistry is the scientific endeavor concerned with the nature of
matter and its transformations. Matter is described in terms of fun-
damental constituents—the chemical elements, understood as atoms
that are themselves composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons
—and chemistry investigates the conditions of how these elemental
constituents (atoms) interact to form larger entities called molecules.
As with chemistry, alchemy was also concerned with the nature and
transformation of matter and was involved with processes like extrac-
tion, conversion, fermentation, distillation, and so forth.