Chemists Are Everywhere!

May 30, 2017 By Emily Hardy
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If you have ever taken any medicine you should thank a chemist!

A long time ago pharmacists or doctors were often chemists. Now chemists still help design and make new medicines.

Chemists can do everything. There are chemists that make new plastics, chemists that make fertilizers to help plants grow better, chemists that make new batteries, chemists that study how your body works to help find ways to cure disease, and even chemists that help brew beer.

The Work Of Chemists

Generally, chemists work with elements and atoms that you can find on the periodic table.

There are five main groups of Chemists. There are inorganic chemists, organic chemists, physical chemists, analytical chemists and biochemists.

Inorganic chemists are people who study things that have to do with metals. Some of these chemists make or study new materials that can do all kinds of things like storing energy or creating new energy, for example. Organic chemists focus on chemicals that mainly have carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. These are the elements (or the types of atoms) that the chemicals in your body are made of. Some organic chemists are synthetic chemists that make new chemicals.

Physical chemists study a mixture of chemistry and physics. Biochemists study how the chemicals in living systems work. Biochemists can work in hospitals or work in labs to study how the chemistry in the body works. Analytical chemists do experiments to exactly determine what chemicals are present. Forensic scientists use analytical chemistry and biochemistry to help solve court cases all the time.

Those are broad examples of specific types of chemistry, but there are more specific types of chemists too. Almost everything you can buy in a store has been made, or at least worked on, by a chemist.

Chemists are everywhere!

Check out this video on the five branches of chemistry.