The World Is Alive

[00:00:00]In 1860, a French chemist named Marcellin Berthelot wrote a book called Chimie Organique Fondée sur la Synthèse or Synthesis-Based Organic Chemistry.

[00:00:11]His book argued that living matter and non-living matter obeyed the same laws of physics. He believed that the difference between a rock and a leaf was just chemistry. This book solidified the principle that there was no life force, no vital principle, nothing special. The body was just stuff. Just chemistry. 26 years later, he became France's Minister for Public Instruction. That is the person who decides what French children get taught at school. Three years after Berthelot published his book, three companies were founded in Germany. Bayer was founded on the 1st of August 1863.

[00:00:49]Bayer was set up by the textile merchant Friedrich Bayer and the dying master Johann Friedrich Wescott. This business was set up with the purpose of industrializing the production of synthetic dye. Synthetic dyes had only been invented in 1856 and Bayer and Wescott spent the entire year of 1862 in a workshop figuring out how to manufacture them at scale. Before Bayer existed, clothes were dyed using plants and insects. For example, to get the color crimson, you would squash cochineal beetles from Mexico. All over the world, people farmed and processed natural dyes. The color in your clothes came from the earth. Then in 1856, British chemist William Henry Perkin was working with aniline, a compound that can be extracted from coal tar. Instead of the substance he was trying to make, he got a vivid purple powder instead. He applied it to silk and it held, so he patented and built a factory. Coal tar, to be clear, is industrial waste. Cities in the 1850s were drowning in this stuff and it had no use. Well, Perkin found one. Within a year, all European chemists were racing to extract other colors from coal tar with the same principle. Germany moved faster than anyone. The reason for this is twofold.

[00:02:12]Firstly, Germany had better funded industry chemistry departments and so more trained chemists, but more so Germany had a larger industrial gas network, so more coal tar. Bayer and Westcott were already in the dyeing trade. They had been working with natural dyes, but upon hearing of this new invention, they immediately started to workshop it. The 1st of August, 1863, the opening of Bayer marked the moment when they had learned to industrially scale it. By the 1860s, they were producing alizarin entirely synthetically. Alizarin is a red compound that had previously been extracted from the madder root. Once Bayer started to create a synthetic version of this at industrial scale, all of the madder root farmers across France, Turkey, and Iran had no way to compete. This is what Bayer was at its beginning, a factory that replaced living dye plants with coal tar chemistry at industrial scale at a price that no farmer could match. Everything else that came from them, from aspirin pharmaceuticals, pesticides, Monsanto, Agent Orange, that all came later from this same synthetic petrochemical base.

[00:03:24]Before 1860, the word organic meant something specific. It meant of an organism, something that came out of a living body. Wood was organic. Bones were organic. Urine was organic. This is Louis Pasteur. You probably have heard of him. His name is on your milk. He argued that when grape juice turns into wine, something is doing the turning, a living thing, yeast. Wine is what happens when yeast eats sugar and breathes out alcohol. If we time travel back 150 years to a lecture hall in Paris, we will hear two men argue over wine. One of them is Louis Pasteur. The other was Marcellin Berthelot, who was the author of this book that I mentioned. He wrote in that book the claim of vitalists that vegetable and animal substances were essentially different from those made in a laboratory were is no longer tenable. He wrote, "There were not two chemistries but one, and chemical reactions in both the inorganic and organic realms depend ultimately on pure mechanical factors."

[00:04:26]Pasteur believed that the world was full of tiny tiny small living things that you could not see, and they were the ones doing the work. Berthelot said there was no work being done. There is only chemical reactions. One of these men was made a saint in French science.

[00:04:42]The other became the foreign minister of France. In their debate over wine, one of them was very wrong, and we live inside a world where the wrong one wrote the rules of chemistry. Before his book, organic meant from a body. After his book, organic meant has carbon in it.

[00:05:03]That's all he changed, one word, one definition. But what does that change do? Life is where organic things come from. Life is the source of your organic chemistry. But if organic only means has carbon in it, then a lump of coal is organic, a bar of soap is organic, a score of petrol is organic. Life is not the source of anything. Life is just one arrangement of carbon among many.

[00:05:26]Berthelot went on to become the minister for public instruction in France. That is the man who decided what French children are taught in school. He took that job six weeks after the French Parliament passed the Goblet Law, which banned religious teachers from public school. Ideas like life originating in the body being blessed by the Holy Spirit.

[00:05:48]They had mostly come through the church.

[00:05:50]Berthelot's job was to make sure the next generation of French children were taught something else instead. They got taught his definition instead, the one where you don't need yeast to make wine.

[00:06:02]This does not say cochineal insects now outweigh all animal life. It says plastic does. Fundamentally, one rots and one doesn't. All of the natural chemistry that humans had been doing for millennia decomposed back into the systems it came out of. Coal tar aniline does not rot, neither do its descendants. Azo dyes and phthalocyanine do not rot. Coal is carbon that stopped decomposing 300 million years ago.

[00:06:33]Everything derived from it inherits those properties.