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by gilleain
1185 days ago
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Yes, /originally/ 'Organic' meant from living matter. However, when it was discovered that urea could be synthesised in the lab, we realised that there was no real distinction between 'living' molecules and 'dead' ones ... Nowadays, 'organic' refers to chemicals with a majority (?) carbon content. It gets a little tricky for things like diamond and graphene (both materials) or for compounds that have a lot of heteroatoms. Oddly enough, another nucleotide base (adenine) is exactly 50:50 C:N and has been proved to be synthesised from just HCN. So is it 'half'organic' :) |
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