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More than ten million poison gas' shells, mortar bombs, etc., lie
hidden in Europe, many of them relics from World War I. Some were
fired and failed to detonate, others were abandoned in old
ammunition dumps. Most retain their load of chemical warfare (CW)
agents. They are turned up daily in the course of farming and
construction. Many European nations have permanent departments
concerned with their collection and destruction. Old munitions,
when discovered, are usually heavily corroded and difficult to
identify. Is it a CW munition? Or an explosive? If CW, what agent
does it contain? Once identified, one has to select a destruction
method. Some of the methods that have been proposed are less than
perfect, and are often complicated by the presence of extraneous
chemicals, either mixed with the CW agents during manufacture or
formed over decades in the ground. Of particular interest are the
insiders' reports on the German CW programmes of both World Wars,
and the current status of Russian chemical armaments.
Enzymes in Action is a timely survey of a modern development in
organic chemistry. It is clear that bioreagents demand that organic
chemists think in a different way. If they do so, they will open up
new avenues of exciting, new chemistry that will permit problems to
be solved in an elegant way. The first section covers the concepts
necessary to understand enzymes in molecular operations. The second
section covers heteroatom enzyme chemistry, with considerable
attention being given to the use of enzymes in the detoxification
of chemical warfare agents and their application in environmental
problems. The final section highlights the strategic use of enzymes
in organic chemistry. It is clear that the term green chemistry' is
appropriate, since enzyme mediated processes occur under mild,
environmentally benign conditions, and enzymes enable chemists to
perform new chemical operations that would otherwise be difficult
to achieve at all.
More than ten million poison gas' shells, mortar bombs, etc., lie
hidden in Europe, many of them relics from World War I. Some were
fired and failed to detonate, others were abandoned in old
ammunition dumps. Most retain their load of chemical warfare (CW)
agents. They are turned up daily in the course of farming and
construction. Many European nations have permanent departments
concerned with their collection and destruction. Old munitions,
when discovered, are usually heavily corroded and difficult to
identify. Is it a CW munition? Or an explosive? If CW, what agent
does it contain? Once identified, one has to select a destruction
method. Some of the methods that have been proposed are less than
perfect, and are often complicated by the presence of extraneous
chemicals, either mixed with the CW agents during manufacture or
formed over decades in the ground. Of particular interest are the
insiders' reports on the German CW programmes of both World Wars,
and the current status of Russian chemical armaments.
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