We are revising our modules for the 2012/2013 academic year (note that this is not the next academic year, the 2011/2012 year, but the one after that – we plan ahead here in British Universities). The University is going to a system of 8 15-credit modules per year. So another academic, Joe Keddie, and are combining our 2 modules into a new one and then changing/rewriting them to make it a coherent module. We are also updating the content. The provisional title is Soft Matter and Biological Physics. Today is a particularly appropriate day to think about this combination as today is Fredrich Wöhler‘s birthday.

You probably have not heard of Friedrich Wõhler, I certainly could not name him until he popped up in a tweet this morning. But he kind of made the idea of a soft matter and biological physics module possible.

Wõhler was a 19th century German chemist; he was born 31st July 1800. He did a bunch of things but one of the most important things was to make urea in the lab. Urea is a common molecule in our urine. Now, you might think: How can you make a scientific breakthrough by making something that is present in relatively large amounts in urine? You might even think: Stop taking the piss. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that.)

But in the 19th century many people still thought that living organisms were somehow separate from the rest of the natural world, that there was something beyond just the laws of physics and chemistry that made living organisms work. Wõhler came along and made what was thought to be something that could only made by a living organisms (urea) and made it in a test-tube. This showed that there is nothing magic about living organisms, our bodies make and break down molecules obeying the same laws that apply to an industrial chemical plant.

Nowadays, a large fraction of chemists are looking at the chemistry that runs our bodies and making molecules that interact with the molecules of our bodes (= drugs). Modern scientists take it for granted that living organisms obey the same chemical laws that chemistry in a test-tube does, and modern industrial chemistry has much in common with the chemistry occurring in your cells right now. For example, both living organisms and industrial chemists need to speed up chemical reactions in a controlled way, and both rely totally on catalysts – substances that speed up reactions without themselves changing in the reaction.

Fewer physicists have worked on understanding living organisms, although of course there have been some very notable contributions of physicists such as the UCL physics graduate Francis Crick. But this is changing and the field of biological physics is growing rapidly, hence the need for a new and improved final year physics course. But it all started with Wõhler, who first showed that we are made from the same stuff as everthing else. That there is no magic, just physics and chemistry.