Prof. Matt Shoulders: Chemistry is the closest thing to magic that there is that's real.
By understanding atoms, learning how to turn them into molecules, how to put the
molecules together, you actually make a new thing that has
never existed before.
Prof. Jeff Grossman: So some students come here and they've had a lot of chemistry in high school,
but the chemistry that we teach them here at MIT is really different.
At MIT, what we want is to make it possible for students to not just
understand chemical equations and rules, we want them to be able to actually
perceive and think about the world at the
molecular level, to approach societal problems from a molecular viewpoint.
Prof. Shoulders: And that's really important because
solutions to many of the world's biggest challenges are necessarily chemical.
Modern chemistry is not what you may think; it's not a bunch of people with
pocket projectors doing titrations and mumbling about potions.
Modern chemistry is about solving climate change, about coming up with new
solutions to the energy crisis, about developing next generation medicines.
In the chemistry GIR you don't just learn
the chemical principles, you learn how they apply to all these types of
problems and how they can help you understand these issues.
For example, we teach acids and bases but we go beyond that to
explain how these properties of molecules
being acidic or basic influence whether or not a drug is affected,
how that drug interacts with cell, and we explain how you can
tune these fundamental properties of the molecule for any desired purpose.
Phoebe Li: I knew that I wanted to become a doctor, and I knew I wanted to study biology,
but very quickly I learned that there's no way you can study biology
unless you know chemistry. You just can't understand the molecular basics of
what goes on in the body, what goes on even at a cellular level, unless you understand chemistry.
Prof. Laura Kiessling: To really manipulate biological systems
for health and disease we need to understand it at a molecular
level and that's really what chemistry gives us. Two major
issues that face modern medicine are understanding our microbiome and
tackling the problem of antibacterial resistance.
So we've been studying human proteins that can selectively recognize the
sugars on bacterial cell walls. To understand that process,
we need to understand things like hydrogen bonding, electronic interactions,
thermodynamics, and even molecular orbitals.
Prof. Grossman: These nanoscale concepts from the chemistry GIR
are also key for understanding and advancing renewable energy.
Prof. Gabriela Schlau-Cohen: We know that one of the major challenges facing us as a society
is climate change, and the only way to address it
is renewable energy sources. So we're very interested in understanding how we
can capture sunlight and convert it into usable energy.
Prof. Shoulders: Photosynthesis is about electrons flowing from one molecule
to another. This is the fundamental process of harvesting
energy from life, and in the chemistry GIRs,
we're going to talk about how you can take these fundamental chemical
principles of electron flow and use them to design new types of materials.
Pooja Reddy: Every major is dependent on materials,
which is dependent on elements, so you need to have some fundamental
understanding what you're doing. For example,
if you're a MechE student, you're going to be building things, but of what? You're going
to be building out of wood, out of alloys. O.K., what are alloys? How do
those elements actually work in chemistry?
The chemistry GIR is really your first step into understanding the basis of what
you're going to be doing.
Prof. Vladimir Bulovic: The world is built from atoms up, hence teaching students how to manage
atoms and bigger objects like nanoscale objects like molecules
is the key to what we need to provide them as educators.
About half of all the discoveries of MIT in the years to come will be nanoscale driven.
Prof. Grossman: So once you understand where electrons
go in an atom, in a molecule, in a solid, well, then you
can understand how to manipulate them to make many, many different devices.
Prof. Julia Ortony: We design molecules, and we synthesize
molecules that self-assemble when you add them to water.
You add water and they zip up into these very long, very small nanofibers,
and so we functionalize the surface of them
for particular applications. For example, we are developing materials for water purification.
Prof. Grossman: Chemistry is about knowing where the
world is going, not just where it is, and I think having
that context in our day-to-day lives, no matter what
we do, whether we care about energy, whether we care about computing,
whether we care about medicine, whether we care about sustainability,
understanding the world around us is an absolutely essential part of it.
Prof. Schlau-Cohen: Chemistry is a lot of fun! We all know that everything in this
world is made up of molecules, but we have no idea why when we just
look at them they have the properties that they do.
So it's so much fun learning about what lies under the magic curtain!