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“化学，是人类用以认识和改造物质世界的主要方法和手段之一。化学成就是社会文明的重要标志。”
初中的化学课上，老师如是说。
在学习化学的过程中，我们也见识了这门学科的神奇。
但是，随着化学化工的大力发展，化学品的大量生产和广泛应用，化学却渐渐变得有些“臭”了。人们一听到化学，就不由自主地联想到了“污染”、“有毒”这些词语。这可害苦了那些兢兢业业，为人类的可持续发展作出卓越贡献的化学家们。
今年，化学家们将无比振奋，因为纯净与应用化学国际联盟和联合国教科文组织把2011年指定为“国际化学年”。而今年也适逢居里夫人获得诺贝尔化学奖100周年。此纪念活动将在全球范围内推广，意在增加公众对于化学的了解和欣赏，提高年轻人对科学的兴趣，培养对化学未来发展的热情。
本期《无限播客》，就让我们来了解一下绿色化学的概念，看看一些行业在化学方面做着怎样的改进，化学家们又在做着怎样的努力。如果你曾对化学有过敌意或误解，那么现在，是时候“化干戈为玉帛”了。
William Crooks: “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly 1)peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources 2)dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land which will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and 3)capricious natural phenomena. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It’s through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. The fixation of
4)atmospheric 5)nitrogen is one of the great discoveries awaiting the 6)genius of chemists.”
Roland: I couldn’t have introduced this program more dramatically than by using the words of Sir William Crooks, in 1898, addressing the 7)august gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
2011 has been declared International Year of Chemistry, a chance for scientists and manufactures to get us all thinking again about one of the major disciplines transforming the modern world. For those engaged every day in the topic, chemistry has brought us medicines, materials, 8)fertilizers, and a thousand other benefits. For outsiders, though, sometimes the result has looked more like pollution and 9)contamination of the planet. But that could all change. I’ll be looking into one of the key themes of the International Year of Chemistry—green chemistry.
Phillip Jessop: Green chemistry is not really a field of chemistry. It’s more like a philosophy of chemistry; a new way of thinking about chemistry.
Roland: Professor Phillip Jessop has long been a keen advocate of green chemistry.
Phillip: When you’re looking at pollution coming out of an industrial process, for example, there are different ways of dealing with that. One is the traditional technique of cleaning up the mess after it’s produced. That’s the least efficient way of doing it. Another approach is to get chemical engineers to design the process so that to [sic] minimize the amount of waste that’s produced. And I think the most efficient way of doing it is to get the chemist who originally designs the reaction to design the reaction in such a way that no waste or very little waste will be produced.
Roland: And it has to be said that chemistry does have a bad reputation. People normally, when you talk about chemistry, think of polluted rivers, 10)smogs, and that kind of thing. It’s…chemists aren’t seen as the people who are trying to help the world really, are they?
Phillip: No, that’s true, we have a bad reputation. But I think we can change that. If chemists increasingly realize, as they are, that we can be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem, then we can turn it around.
Roland: To change the world you need industry to take up the idea. Braskem is one of Brazil’s major manufacturers. Since last year, they’ve started 11)wedding their bio-12)ethanol production to their polymers line. Leonora Novaes is commercial leader of Braskem’s Green 13)Polymers Commercial Division.
Leonora Novaes: Braskem is producing the same chemical, the
14)ethylene, but now not based on the oil. What we are doing in this project is now using the ethanol from the sugar cane as the main raw material.
Roland: Because one of the major products you do in Brazil is the bio-ethanol used for fuels, but this is now looking at another use for the bio-ethanol.
Leonora: That’s it. So what Braskem is doing now is looking for the bio-ethanol from a different perspective: not any more as a fuel, but now as a raw material to work plastic. So what Braskem is doing is offering a plastic based on a bio-fuel, and this plastic is the most used worldwide.
Roland: Nitrogen is one of the most important elements for life, and yet it’s one of the most difficult for life to get hold of. By the end of the 19th century it was becoming clear that nature could not satisfy society’s growing need for nitrogen, hence, Sir William Crooks’s call for a discovery of a way to fix nitrogen from the air. Now, in the 21st century, it’s clear that the industrial process that was found to do that fixing is one of the main polluters of the modern world. The call is to find a greener way, but, as you’ll hear in this program, that may prove hard to find.
But first, what is it about nitrogen that makes it so important an element?
Paul Falkowski: Nitrogen is one of what we call the “big six”.
Roland: Professor Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University studies the chemistry of life.
Paul: So you have hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
15)phosphorus and 16)sulphur. Those are the “big six” elements. So, if you take all the macro-molecules of life—proteins, 17)nucleic acids, 18)lipids—everything that you and I are made of and every other living organism on the planet is made of, nitrogen would be essential. It’s a core part of all the proteins and it’s a core part of all the nucleic acids.
Roland: And, frankly, you’re saying that without that nitrogen, the things that the biological molecules do wouldn’t be able to do then.
Paul: Right. There is no substitute for nitrogen that nature has provided or that any chemist that I know of can provide. So without that, we wouldn’t exist. No bug on the planet would exist.
Roland: Bio-chemist Brian Hoffman has long been fascinated by the way that nature mastered one of the toughest molecules on the planet.
Brian Hoffman: It may not be unexpectedly hard. One of the strongest bonds that nature and biology has to deal with is this bond in atmospheric and tube gas. So it’s expectedly hard in the sense that to 19)rip that bond apart; that’s a very hard job. It’s hard for us and it’s hard for nature, but nature found a way a long time ago to do it in an efficient way at ambient temperature and pressure, and it took us till early in the last century to learn how to do it industrially, and there we can’t do that at 20)ambient temperature and pressure, but it takes high temperature, high pressure to do it.
Roland: Paul Chirik of Princeton University has been exploring 21)exotic parts of the 22)periodic table for alternative metals that will achieve what nature mastered long ago.
Paul Chirik: Nature has us beat. Nature uses, for the most part, iron, 23)vanadium and 24)molybdenum to do this: iron being the most common of those three. And unfortunately, in the laboratory, we haven’t learned how to harness iron quite yet to do this chemistry. That’s ultimately the goal, though, because iron is one of the cheapest and most abundant metals on the periodic table.
Roland:The spread of nitrogen fertilizers in the 1960s was one of the foundations of the green revolution that transformed agriculture. Industry has got twenty-fold better in terms of the amount of energy it uses, but the challenge remains: can we find a greener way to fertilize our fields?
威廉·克鲁克斯：“英国和所有人类文明国度都正面临着粮食不足的严峻考验。随着人口剧增，粮食资源日益耗竭。我们的土地面积有限，利用这些土地种植小麦完全依赖自然条件，受变幻莫测的环境因素所限制。能把我们从迫在眉睫的困境里解救出来的正是化学家。通过化学实验研究，最终也许能化粮荒为丰收。大气氮素固定正是这样一种伟大突破，其奥秘有待化学天才们进一步破解为人们利用。”
罗兰：要形象有力地带出我们今天节目的主题，我别无他选。大家刚才听到的是英国伦敦皇家化学学院的化学家和物理学家
威廉·克鲁克斯爵士在1898年面对英国科学促进协会一众威严的科学家们所作的演讲选段。
2011年是国际化学年，科学家和各大制造厂商可籍此唤起关注，让我们对改变现代世界的这一大学科重新作一番思考。每天忙碌于这一领域的人们会觉得化学给我们带来了药物、材料、化肥和其他千百种便利。而有时候在局外人眼中，化学带来的更多的却是对地球的污染糟蹋。但这种观感是可以完全改变过来的。我将跟大家一起探讨国际化学年的一大主题——绿色化学。
菲利普·杰索普：准确地说，绿色化学不是化学研究的一个专门领域，而更应该是指导化学研究的一种哲学、一种关于化学的新思维。
罗兰：菲利普·杰索普教授一直积极倡议推动绿色化学运动。
菲利普：面对工业生产过程排放的污染，有不同的处理方法。一种是传统的方法，在污染产生后才来清理，这是最低效的手段。而另一种方式是让化学工程师们优化整个流程，把伴生的污染废物减至最低。我认为最有效的就是让设计生产流程中化学反应的那个工程师争取把设计做到零污染和少污染。
罗兰：不得不说，化学的确恶名在外。一提起化学，人们一般会想到受污染的江河和烟雾毒霾之类的东西。在大家心目中，搞化学的人不太像是会拯救地球的吧？
菲利普：没错，这是真的，我们的名声是不太好。不过，我觉得我们可以改变这种印象。如果有更多的化学工作者意识到（现在不少已开始意识到）自己可以为解决问题献计献力而非制造问题，我们就可以扭转局面了。
罗兰：要改变世界，需有工业支持，将上述想法付诸行动。巴西石化公司（Braskem）是巴西的制造业巨头之一。从去年开始，这家公司开始把生物乙醇的生产跟塑料聚合物的生产线融合到一起来。里恩罗拉·诺菲斯是巴西石化公司绿色聚合物分部的商务主管。
里恩罗拉·诺菲斯：巴西石化现在生产的是跟过去一样的化工产品，一样的乙烯，不过生产过程不再依赖石油。我们这个项目做的是以甘蔗里提取的乙醇作为主要的生产原料。
罗兰：因为你们生产供应巴西市场的一大产品就是用作燃料的生物乙醇，而现在研究开发的是生物乙醇的另一用处。
里恩罗拉：正是这样。巴西石化在做的是从另一角度看待生物乙醇：不再把它当作燃料而已，现在还是一种生产塑料的原材料。也就是说，巴西石化在生产基于生物燃料的塑料，而这种塑料正是在全球应用最广泛的。
罗兰：氮是构成生命体最重要的元素之一，但也是最不容易获取的。到了19世纪末，大家清晰感觉到，社会不断发展，对氮的需求日增，自然根本无法满足，所以才有威廉·克鲁克斯爵士的呼吁，让化学家们研究把大气中的氮固定下来加以利用。当初努力研发的大气氮固定工业流程在21世纪的今天看来却明显地成为现代世界的主要污染源头。由此，我们有必要寻求一种更环保的方式，但正如你在本节目中听到的那样，这也许不是一朝一夕能做到的。
但首先要问一句：为什么氮是如此重要的一种元素呢？
保罗·诺弗卡斯基：氮是我们所谓的“六大”元素之一。
罗兰：保罗·弗卡斯基教授是罗格斯大学研究生命化学的专家。
保罗：氢、碳、氧、氮、磷、硫，这些就是“六大”元素。看看构成生命体的那些巨分子——蛋白质、核酸、脂质——构成你我及这地球上的所有生命机体的分子，氮是其中不可或缺的元素，是所有蛋白质和核酸的核心成分。
罗兰：那坦白说，你的意思是，缺少了氮，生物分子将无法正常运作了？
保罗：对。自然界没有任何物质能取代氮，据我所知也还没任何化学家能研发出氮的替代物。所以，缺氮的话，我们都无法生存，这地球上连一只小虫子也活不了。
罗兰：大自然不费吹灰之力便能成就一种最难人工合成的分子，这是一直令生物化学家布莱恩•贺夫曼深深着迷的。
布莱恩·贺夫曼：难度也是可想而知的。大气和管道气体里，氮键公认是大自然和生物学面对的最强力的化学键之一。所以，要拆解这一化学键，其难度是意料之中的。对我们而言难，对大自然而言，也难。但大自然在很久以前就已经可以在正常环境温度和压力下拆解成功了，我们人类则直到上世纪才学会利用工业技术做到，而且要加以高温高压才行。
罗兰：普林斯顿大学的保罗·齐瑞科教授一直致力于研究利用元素周期表里的那些异金属作替代金属来仿效大自然早已达到的效果。
保罗·齐瑞科：我们就是比不过大自然。自然力量主要是用铁、钒和钼，三者之中，铁是最普通不过的金属。但遗憾的是，在实验室里，我们仍然没法利用铁来做这一化学反应，而我们将以那为最终的目标，因为铁是整个元素周期表里最便宜最充足的金属。
罗兰：20世纪60年代，氮肥的推广应用为后来彻底改变农业运作的绿色革命奠定一大基础。工业用能源有了20倍的提升，但挑战依旧：我们能找到更环保绿色的方法换来肥沃的农田吗？
初中的化学课上，老师如是说。
在学习化学的过程中，我们也见识了这门学科的神奇。
但是，随着化学化工的大力发展，化学品的大量生产和广泛应用，化学却渐渐变得有些“臭”了。人们一听到化学，就不由自主地联想到了“污染”、“有毒”这些词语。这可害苦了那些兢兢业业，为人类的可持续发展作出卓越贡献的化学家们。
今年，化学家们将无比振奋，因为纯净与应用化学国际联盟和联合国教科文组织把2011年指定为“国际化学年”。而今年也适逢居里夫人获得诺贝尔化学奖100周年。此纪念活动将在全球范围内推广，意在增加公众对于化学的了解和欣赏，提高年轻人对科学的兴趣，培养对化学未来发展的热情。
本期《无限播客》，就让我们来了解一下绿色化学的概念，看看一些行业在化学方面做着怎样的改进，化学家们又在做着怎样的努力。如果你曾对化学有过敌意或误解，那么现在，是时候“化干戈为玉帛”了。
William Crooks: “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly 1)peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources 2)dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land which will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and 3)capricious natural phenomena. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It’s through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. The fixation of
4)atmospheric 5)nitrogen is one of the great discoveries awaiting the 6)genius of chemists.”
Roland: I couldn’t have introduced this program more dramatically than by using the words of Sir William Crooks, in 1898, addressing the 7)august gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
2011 has been declared International Year of Chemistry, a chance for scientists and manufactures to get us all thinking again about one of the major disciplines transforming the modern world. For those engaged every day in the topic, chemistry has brought us medicines, materials, 8)fertilizers, and a thousand other benefits. For outsiders, though, sometimes the result has looked more like pollution and 9)contamination of the planet. But that could all change. I’ll be looking into one of the key themes of the International Year of Chemistry—green chemistry.
Phillip Jessop: Green chemistry is not really a field of chemistry. It’s more like a philosophy of chemistry; a new way of thinking about chemistry.
Roland: Professor Phillip Jessop has long been a keen advocate of green chemistry.
Phillip: When you’re looking at pollution coming out of an industrial process, for example, there are different ways of dealing with that. One is the traditional technique of cleaning up the mess after it’s produced. That’s the least efficient way of doing it. Another approach is to get chemical engineers to design the process so that to [sic] minimize the amount of waste that’s produced. And I think the most efficient way of doing it is to get the chemist who originally designs the reaction to design the reaction in such a way that no waste or very little waste will be produced.
Roland: And it has to be said that chemistry does have a bad reputation. People normally, when you talk about chemistry, think of polluted rivers, 10)smogs, and that kind of thing. It’s…chemists aren’t seen as the people who are trying to help the world really, are they?
Phillip: No, that’s true, we have a bad reputation. But I think we can change that. If chemists increasingly realize, as they are, that we can be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem, then we can turn it around.
Roland: To change the world you need industry to take up the idea. Braskem is one of Brazil’s major manufacturers. Since last year, they’ve started 11)wedding their bio-12)ethanol production to their polymers line. Leonora Novaes is commercial leader of Braskem’s Green 13)Polymers Commercial Division.
Leonora Novaes: Braskem is producing the same chemical, the
14)ethylene, but now not based on the oil. What we are doing in this project is now using the ethanol from the sugar cane as the main raw material.
Roland: Because one of the major products you do in Brazil is the bio-ethanol used for fuels, but this is now looking at another use for the bio-ethanol.
Leonora: That’s it. So what Braskem is doing now is looking for the bio-ethanol from a different perspective: not any more as a fuel, but now as a raw material to work plastic. So what Braskem is doing is offering a plastic based on a bio-fuel, and this plastic is the most used worldwide.
Roland: Nitrogen is one of the most important elements for life, and yet it’s one of the most difficult for life to get hold of. By the end of the 19th century it was becoming clear that nature could not satisfy society’s growing need for nitrogen, hence, Sir William Crooks’s call for a discovery of a way to fix nitrogen from the air. Now, in the 21st century, it’s clear that the industrial process that was found to do that fixing is one of the main polluters of the modern world. The call is to find a greener way, but, as you’ll hear in this program, that may prove hard to find.
But first, what is it about nitrogen that makes it so important an element?
Paul Falkowski: Nitrogen is one of what we call the “big six”.
Roland: Professor Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University studies the chemistry of life.
Paul: So you have hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
15)phosphorus and 16)sulphur. Those are the “big six” elements. So, if you take all the macro-molecules of life—proteins, 17)nucleic acids, 18)lipids—everything that you and I are made of and every other living organism on the planet is made of, nitrogen would be essential. It’s a core part of all the proteins and it’s a core part of all the nucleic acids.
Roland: And, frankly, you’re saying that without that nitrogen, the things that the biological molecules do wouldn’t be able to do then.
Paul: Right. There is no substitute for nitrogen that nature has provided or that any chemist that I know of can provide. So without that, we wouldn’t exist. No bug on the planet would exist.
Roland: Bio-chemist Brian Hoffman has long been fascinated by the way that nature mastered one of the toughest molecules on the planet.
Brian Hoffman: It may not be unexpectedly hard. One of the strongest bonds that nature and biology has to deal with is this bond in atmospheric and tube gas. So it’s expectedly hard in the sense that to 19)rip that bond apart; that’s a very hard job. It’s hard for us and it’s hard for nature, but nature found a way a long time ago to do it in an efficient way at ambient temperature and pressure, and it took us till early in the last century to learn how to do it industrially, and there we can’t do that at 20)ambient temperature and pressure, but it takes high temperature, high pressure to do it.
Roland: Paul Chirik of Princeton University has been exploring 21)exotic parts of the 22)periodic table for alternative metals that will achieve what nature mastered long ago.
Paul Chirik: Nature has us beat. Nature uses, for the most part, iron, 23)vanadium and 24)molybdenum to do this: iron being the most common of those three. And unfortunately, in the laboratory, we haven’t learned how to harness iron quite yet to do this chemistry. That’s ultimately the goal, though, because iron is one of the cheapest and most abundant metals on the periodic table.
Roland:The spread of nitrogen fertilizers in the 1960s was one of the foundations of the green revolution that transformed agriculture. Industry has got twenty-fold better in terms of the amount of energy it uses, but the challenge remains: can we find a greener way to fertilize our fields?
威廉·克鲁克斯：“英国和所有人类文明国度都正面临着粮食不足的严峻考验。随着人口剧增，粮食资源日益耗竭。我们的土地面积有限，利用这些土地种植小麦完全依赖自然条件，受变幻莫测的环境因素所限制。能把我们从迫在眉睫的困境里解救出来的正是化学家。通过化学实验研究，最终也许能化粮荒为丰收。大气氮素固定正是这样一种伟大突破，其奥秘有待化学天才们进一步破解为人们利用。”
罗兰：要形象有力地带出我们今天节目的主题，我别无他选。大家刚才听到的是英国伦敦皇家化学学院的化学家和物理学家
威廉·克鲁克斯爵士在1898年面对英国科学促进协会一众威严的科学家们所作的演讲选段。
2011年是国际化学年，科学家和各大制造厂商可籍此唤起关注，让我们对改变现代世界的这一大学科重新作一番思考。每天忙碌于这一领域的人们会觉得化学给我们带来了药物、材料、化肥和其他千百种便利。而有时候在局外人眼中，化学带来的更多的却是对地球的污染糟蹋。但这种观感是可以完全改变过来的。我将跟大家一起探讨国际化学年的一大主题——绿色化学。
菲利普·杰索普：准确地说，绿色化学不是化学研究的一个专门领域，而更应该是指导化学研究的一种哲学、一种关于化学的新思维。
罗兰：菲利普·杰索普教授一直积极倡议推动绿色化学运动。
菲利普：面对工业生产过程排放的污染，有不同的处理方法。一种是传统的方法，在污染产生后才来清理，这是最低效的手段。而另一种方式是让化学工程师们优化整个流程，把伴生的污染废物减至最低。我认为最有效的就是让设计生产流程中化学反应的那个工程师争取把设计做到零污染和少污染。
罗兰：不得不说，化学的确恶名在外。一提起化学，人们一般会想到受污染的江河和烟雾毒霾之类的东西。在大家心目中，搞化学的人不太像是会拯救地球的吧？
菲利普：没错，这是真的，我们的名声是不太好。不过，我觉得我们可以改变这种印象。如果有更多的化学工作者意识到（现在不少已开始意识到）自己可以为解决问题献计献力而非制造问题，我们就可以扭转局面了。
罗兰：要改变世界，需有工业支持，将上述想法付诸行动。巴西石化公司（Braskem）是巴西的制造业巨头之一。从去年开始，这家公司开始把生物乙醇的生产跟塑料聚合物的生产线融合到一起来。里恩罗拉·诺菲斯是巴西石化公司绿色聚合物分部的商务主管。
里恩罗拉·诺菲斯：巴西石化现在生产的是跟过去一样的化工产品，一样的乙烯，不过生产过程不再依赖石油。我们这个项目做的是以甘蔗里提取的乙醇作为主要的生产原料。
罗兰：因为你们生产供应巴西市场的一大产品就是用作燃料的生物乙醇，而现在研究开发的是生物乙醇的另一用处。
里恩罗拉：正是这样。巴西石化在做的是从另一角度看待生物乙醇：不再把它当作燃料而已，现在还是一种生产塑料的原材料。也就是说，巴西石化在生产基于生物燃料的塑料，而这种塑料正是在全球应用最广泛的。
罗兰：氮是构成生命体最重要的元素之一，但也是最不容易获取的。到了19世纪末，大家清晰感觉到，社会不断发展，对氮的需求日增，自然根本无法满足，所以才有威廉·克鲁克斯爵士的呼吁，让化学家们研究把大气中的氮固定下来加以利用。当初努力研发的大气氮固定工业流程在21世纪的今天看来却明显地成为现代世界的主要污染源头。由此，我们有必要寻求一种更环保的方式，但正如你在本节目中听到的那样，这也许不是一朝一夕能做到的。
但首先要问一句：为什么氮是如此重要的一种元素呢？
保罗·诺弗卡斯基：氮是我们所谓的“六大”元素之一。
罗兰：保罗·弗卡斯基教授是罗格斯大学研究生命化学的专家。
保罗：氢、碳、氧、氮、磷、硫，这些就是“六大”元素。看看构成生命体的那些巨分子——蛋白质、核酸、脂质——构成你我及这地球上的所有生命机体的分子，氮是其中不可或缺的元素，是所有蛋白质和核酸的核心成分。
罗兰：那坦白说，你的意思是，缺少了氮，生物分子将无法正常运作了？
保罗：对。自然界没有任何物质能取代氮，据我所知也还没任何化学家能研发出氮的替代物。所以，缺氮的话，我们都无法生存，这地球上连一只小虫子也活不了。
罗兰：大自然不费吹灰之力便能成就一种最难人工合成的分子，这是一直令生物化学家布莱恩•贺夫曼深深着迷的。
布莱恩·贺夫曼：难度也是可想而知的。大气和管道气体里，氮键公认是大自然和生物学面对的最强力的化学键之一。所以，要拆解这一化学键，其难度是意料之中的。对我们而言难，对大自然而言，也难。但大自然在很久以前就已经可以在正常环境温度和压力下拆解成功了，我们人类则直到上世纪才学会利用工业技术做到，而且要加以高温高压才行。
罗兰：普林斯顿大学的保罗·齐瑞科教授一直致力于研究利用元素周期表里的那些异金属作替代金属来仿效大自然早已达到的效果。
保罗·齐瑞科：我们就是比不过大自然。自然力量主要是用铁、钒和钼，三者之中，铁是最普通不过的金属。但遗憾的是，在实验室里，我们仍然没法利用铁来做这一化学反应，而我们将以那为最终的目标，因为铁是整个元素周期表里最便宜最充足的金属。
罗兰：20世纪60年代，氮肥的推广应用为后来彻底改变农业运作的绿色革命奠定一大基础。工业用能源有了20倍的提升，但挑战依旧：我们能找到更环保绿色的方法换来肥沃的农田吗？