About John Dobiecki Expertise 25+ years experience in pharmaceuticals, specialty checmicals. biopharmaceuticals and medical devices. Have worked on the bench up to current position of VP/GM.
Question How does an understanding of matter (in general) and it's properties lead to the production of useful sunbstances and new technologies?
Answer Hi Sarah,
Pretty good geneal question. If we have an understanding of the substance of which a physical object is composed and it properties than that really allows us to do a couple of things: 1st - it allows us to work with it. For example take iron, when you heat it becomes malleable. You can bend it, shape it and then when cooled it become hard again and can be used as a tool. Our knowledge and understanding of metals such as iron created a whole new way of doing things that really got us to where we are today.
2nd - As far as new substances, let take iron as an example again. As you probably know iron is hard and because of this makes good tools. But iron has a huge draw back....it rusts. So over time time as people began to understand metals (like iron) they gained knowledge on how to work with them. They soon dicovered that some other metals, like nickel and chromium, didn't rust. Now these other metals probably weren't as easy to work with as iron (nor as abundant). Eventually, they understood the properties of these different metals to the point where they were able to experiment and make different blends or mixes with these metals. This in turn eventually led to the dicovery of rust proof iron that's called stainless steel. And of course stainless steel, because of it's "inert" properties is used in everything from kitchen utesils to artificial hips.
So I guess in a nut shell that's it. I hope this helped.
