Carbon — We Wouldn’t Be Here Without It
September 14, 2019 at 5:46 p.m.
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Our skin and hair, blood and bone, muscle and sinews all depend on carbon, indeed, every cell in our body and every part of every cell—relies on a sturdy backbone of carbon.
Hazen’s words become poetry as he writes “the carbon of a mother’s milk becomes the carbon of her child’s beating heart. Carbon is the chemical essence of your lover’s eyes, hands, lips, and brain. When you breathe, you exhale carbon; when you kiss, carbon atoms embrace.”
Carbon has been called the “divine element” and the basic building block of organic life on this planet and likely other planets as well. Here on Earth, every life form we know is based on chemistry built around carbon. It provides the foundation of just about every molecule you will find in a living thing from trees to bacteria to all of us. There are more than 10 million life forms.
What makes carbon so special is that it has the ability to make four bonds with surrounding atoms. This includes the means to bond with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Carbon’s biochemical compounds, including carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids are essential for living beings.
Carbon is unique, because of its bonding ability it can form single, double or triple covalent bonds with other atoms. As explained by Curt Stager in his book, “Your Atomic Self,” any single carbon atom can double-grip two atomic partners or join a long molecular chain while carrying two other atoms with it. In this manner the same carbon atom can become part of an almost limitless number of molecules, moving from role to role like an actor auditioning for different parts in a theater.
“The carbon atoms in your eyelashes could just as well help to produce the transparent corneal proteins and distinctive pigments of your eyes. In ages past they may also have been spun into the world’s first spider webs, or brightened the colorful wings of ancestral birds, or sweetened the fragrances of prehistoric flowers.”
Literally seconds after the Big Bang, the event that gave birth to the universe, there were few carbon atoms present, actually, only one carbon atom formed for every few quintillion hydrogen atoms — a tiny fraction. But a tiny fraction of a huge number can still be a very big number.
Simple division suggests that the Big Bang produced more than 1,064 carbon atoms! That total represents only a minuscule fraction of the universe’s mass, and it’s only a trillionth of the total carbon atoms found in the universe today, but it’s still a lot of primordial carbon atoms.
Where are those 1,064 carbon atoms today? Some were surely captured in prior generations of stars, subjected to cycles of nuclear fusion reactions, and thus modified to other, heavier elements. Other Big Bang carbon atoms have been dispersed, scattered far and wide throughout today’s universe in cosmic dust and gas. But vast numbers of those very first atoms of carbon have become intermingled with our modern world, indistinguishable from atoms formed in much later events.
Stars are the engines of chemical evolution. Subjected to the unimaginable heat and pressure of stellar interiors, hydrogen fused into helium, while triplets of helium nuclei fused into carbon — a slow process, to be sure, but stars are around a long time. And so, carbon gradually increased in concentration, ultimately to become the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe, with almost five carbon atoms for every 1,000 hydrogen atoms.
Your body contains more than 100 trillion trillion atoms of carbon, about 18% of its content. It follows inevitably that trillions of those atoms must be the very same carbon nuclei that formed so long ago in the throes of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis — atoms inseparable from the more recent hoard of carbon forged in stars. And the same is true of your essential oxygen atoms and your nitrogen atoms, not to mention all that primordial hydrogen — other elements essential to life.
Final Thoughts
Chemically, carbon is described as a non-metal solid that occurs in three completely different structural forms (diamond, graphite and fullerenes). Fullerene is the form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in soccer-ball shapes. Carbon has been known since ancient times but was first recognized as an element in the second half of the 18th century. Antoine Lavoisier proposed carbon in 1789 from the Latin carbo meaning "charcoal." Carbon is listed as Element 6 in the Periodic Table.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
Our skin and hair, blood and bone, muscle and sinews all depend on carbon, indeed, every cell in our body and every part of every cell—relies on a sturdy backbone of carbon.
Hazen’s words become poetry as he writes “the carbon of a mother’s milk becomes the carbon of her child’s beating heart. Carbon is the chemical essence of your lover’s eyes, hands, lips, and brain. When you breathe, you exhale carbon; when you kiss, carbon atoms embrace.”
Carbon has been called the “divine element” and the basic building block of organic life on this planet and likely other planets as well. Here on Earth, every life form we know is based on chemistry built around carbon. It provides the foundation of just about every molecule you will find in a living thing from trees to bacteria to all of us. There are more than 10 million life forms.
What makes carbon so special is that it has the ability to make four bonds with surrounding atoms. This includes the means to bond with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Carbon’s biochemical compounds, including carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids are essential for living beings.
Carbon is unique, because of its bonding ability it can form single, double or triple covalent bonds with other atoms. As explained by Curt Stager in his book, “Your Atomic Self,” any single carbon atom can double-grip two atomic partners or join a long molecular chain while carrying two other atoms with it. In this manner the same carbon atom can become part of an almost limitless number of molecules, moving from role to role like an actor auditioning for different parts in a theater.
“The carbon atoms in your eyelashes could just as well help to produce the transparent corneal proteins and distinctive pigments of your eyes. In ages past they may also have been spun into the world’s first spider webs, or brightened the colorful wings of ancestral birds, or sweetened the fragrances of prehistoric flowers.”
Literally seconds after the Big Bang, the event that gave birth to the universe, there were few carbon atoms present, actually, only one carbon atom formed for every few quintillion hydrogen atoms — a tiny fraction. But a tiny fraction of a huge number can still be a very big number.
Simple division suggests that the Big Bang produced more than 1,064 carbon atoms! That total represents only a minuscule fraction of the universe’s mass, and it’s only a trillionth of the total carbon atoms found in the universe today, but it’s still a lot of primordial carbon atoms.
Where are those 1,064 carbon atoms today? Some were surely captured in prior generations of stars, subjected to cycles of nuclear fusion reactions, and thus modified to other, heavier elements. Other Big Bang carbon atoms have been dispersed, scattered far and wide throughout today’s universe in cosmic dust and gas. But vast numbers of those very first atoms of carbon have become intermingled with our modern world, indistinguishable from atoms formed in much later events.
Stars are the engines of chemical evolution. Subjected to the unimaginable heat and pressure of stellar interiors, hydrogen fused into helium, while triplets of helium nuclei fused into carbon — a slow process, to be sure, but stars are around a long time. And so, carbon gradually increased in concentration, ultimately to become the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe, with almost five carbon atoms for every 1,000 hydrogen atoms.
Your body contains more than 100 trillion trillion atoms of carbon, about 18% of its content. It follows inevitably that trillions of those atoms must be the very same carbon nuclei that formed so long ago in the throes of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis — atoms inseparable from the more recent hoard of carbon forged in stars. And the same is true of your essential oxygen atoms and your nitrogen atoms, not to mention all that primordial hydrogen — other elements essential to life.
Final Thoughts
Chemically, carbon is described as a non-metal solid that occurs in three completely different structural forms (diamond, graphite and fullerenes). Fullerene is the form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in soccer-ball shapes. Carbon has been known since ancient times but was first recognized as an element in the second half of the 18th century. Antoine Lavoisier proposed carbon in 1789 from the Latin carbo meaning "charcoal." Carbon is listed as Element 6 in the Periodic Table.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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