Thoughts and Experiments on a Chemical Etiology of Nucleic Acid Structure

Organic chemists enamoured with the science and art of chemical syntheses can’t help being fascinated again and again by the power of the language of organic chemistry. It is a language which makes it possible to model virtually the entire world of organic molecules with a handful of very simple rules. More and more, it also becomes the biologists’ language, whenever their research problems lead them down to the molecular level of the chemist. At this symposium, we honour one of the creators of this language, Josef Loschmidt, and we do so by reflecting on the history of the ideas that had led to it more than a century ago, and by illustrating the paramount role this graphic language of organic chemistry plays in our time.