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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to ingredients, if synthesis can produce exact same chemical compound, does it really matter if it is natural or synthetic!? At the end of the day, it is a chemical compound.

I presume though that sythesis just can’t produce the exact compound mixture that nature can and hence the demand for natural ingredients.

Really, people have bent over for natural things, often unnecessarily romaticizing about it in cases where we can produce the exact compound. Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit if nature produced it or some highly intelligent beings reverse engineered it.

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At times the natural product is far too complicated to synthesize. Then the chemists go off to find a workable substitute, and the art is to find a good one: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/a-scent-of-a-f...

Yes it can, and no it can't.

Yes, you can synthesize a chemical. But no, refining is never perfect. If you get the chemical from a plant, then the impurities will be other stuff from the plant. But if you synthesize it from a chemical factory, the impurities will be other stuff from the factory process, which probably will be not at all the same.

We aren't living in star trek or have replicators yet.

15 years ago I heard the head of DARPA talk about the work that he thought would the hardest to do and the biggest reward. High on that list was what he called "an artificial nose"--a chemical detector so sensitive that it could reliably distinguish between millions of different scents.

To this day I don't think we are even close. Think about how we still use dogs in highly critical functions like tracking people, detecting drugs or explosives, or even detecting when a diabetic kid has a blood sugar level out of its safe range.

So, I think we are still a very long way from being able to arbitrarily synthesize a scent. I don't think we even fully know how a sense of smell works; it's not just the receptors but also the cognitive processing. As an analogy, look at the complexity required to understand and manage color perception. And physically, the EM spectrum is way less complex than the organic chemistry in scent.

While research in these two fields certainly can overlap and influence each other, in the end they are still different fields with different goals:

- Synthesizing compounds

- Creating sensors to detect compounds

The goals in one field might be realizable while the goals in the other remain elusive.

How do you know if you have succeeded in synthesizing something if you can't detect it?

You can build a nose to detect something specific quite easily. Building a nose to smell everything is hard

There are many answers to this question. Sometimes you can be certain of what you synthesized based on observations about the reaction process, including heat absorbed or emitted. Sometimes you can put the compound in a solution with other known quantities and react them to identifiable products. You can run the compound through a series of different tests which collectively confirm that you've synthesized it. Spectral analysis can play a role. Chromatography. In extreme cases, you might bombard it with radiation and interpret the scattering pattern.

The kind of device that would function as a reusable detector for small amounts of the substance floating freely in the air, while useful for measuring air pollution, is rarely used when researching how to synthesize new compounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orris_oil

It's 85% myristic acid but I would venture a guess that the other 15% is an assemblage of plant secondary metabolites that are delicate and difficult to get just right synthetically.

You are right a chemical is a chemical. It is just that the smell Orris (or any other smelling flower) is made up of hundreds of chemicals each with its own volatility profile. No one has been able to get it right even with modern spectrography tools. Now the real kicker is even with the actual rose (or any other flower) oil, you can't recreate the smell of fresh rose. There is the whole field of headspace analysis that tries to cover that.

The compounds are often super complicated though. We can run fancy wines, bourbons and Coca Cola through a mass spectrometer and see exactly what's in it... but we can't currently just create those things. I would assume something being "natural" vs not would influence consumers on wines but not on Coca Cola. If it could be done cheaply in a fully synthetic I would assume they would be the first to do it.

You say that the value of orris is silly because we can just synthesise it... then admit that we don't actually know how to synthesise it.

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