Source: NEMO Kennislink / Michelle Wijma
Spring 2009, near Paris. Ghislaine Vantomme is sitting on the bed in her student dorm room, scrolling through websites about master's programs in chemistry. The choice is overwhelming. I like all kinds of chemistry, the frustrated Frenchwoman thinks. There's a knock at her door. Her good friend Sylvain pokes his head in.
"Come on, we're going to the Collège de France," he says. "Jean-Marie Lehn is giving a talk. A rare opportunity-you don't see a Nobel Prize winner every day!"
Talk by a Nobel laureate
That afternoon, in a packed lecture hall, Lehn speaks passionately about his field of research: supramolecular chemistry. This branch of science explores how small building blocks can come together to form large, well-organized structures.
Lehn explains how chemistry builds a bridge between physics and biology. He shows stunning structures that his team has synthesized over the years and describes how molecules can "recognize" one another and interact-like magnets attracting and repelling, puzzle pieces clicking together, or, more poetically, words forming a sentence that carries meaning. Except all of it happens on the tiniest of scales. You could call it the architecture of chemistry. The field draws on all kinds of chemical disciplines: from synthesizing and analyzing molecules to physical chemistry, materials science, and interactions that go beyond individual molecules.
Chemistry's wonder can be revealed to kids through the simplest things.
Gislaine Vantomme
