Chemical Stories

Does an anticancer drug have to attack the cancer cell itself? Pembrolizumab helped change the answer by targeting a molecular "brake" that tumors can use to suppress the immune response.

Humans were working with iron oxide chemistry long before chemistry had a name. Some evidence of deliberate ochre processing goes back about 100,000 years.

What did ordinary barium chloride have to do with Marie Curie's isolation of radium? The answer is a beautiful lesson in how tiny chemical differences become powerful when repeated.

Does an anticancer drug have to attack the cancer cell itself? Pembrolizumab helped change the answer by targeting a molecular "brake" that tumors can use to suppress the immune response.

Why must blue indigo temporarily stop behaving like blue indigo before it can dye your jeans? Sodium dithionite makes possible one of textile chemistry's most elegant reduction-oxidation cycles.

How can the sudden disappearance of a blue color become a precise chemical measurement? Sodium thiosulfate turns one of chemistry's most dramatic color changes into a quantitative endpoint.