From Inorganic to Organic Phosphates
By the middle of the 19th century, the source of phosphorus in natural phosphates and the chemistry of its oxidation products had been established. The main difficulty that had to be overcome was that these oxidation products existed in so many forms, not only several stages of oxidation, but, in addition, aggregations and condensations of the phosphoric acids. Once the fundamental chemistry of these acids was elucidated, the attention of chemists and physiologists turned to the task of finding the actual state in which phosphorus compounds were present in the organisms. It had been a great advance when it had been shown that plants need phosphates in their soil. This led to the next question concerning the materials in the body of the plant for which phosphates were being used and into which they were incorporated. Similarly, the knowledge that animals attain their phosphates from the digested plant food called, in the next step of scientific inquiry, for information on the nature of phosphates produced from this source.
The method used in this inquiry was to subject anatomically separated parts of the organisms to chemical separations. The means for such separations had to be more gentle than the strong heat and destructive chemicals that had been considered adequate up to then. The interpretation of the new results naturally relied on the general advance of chemistry, the development of new methods for isolating substances of little stability, of new concepts concerning the arrangements of atoms in the molecules, and of new apparatus to measure their rates of change.
In the system of chemistry, as it developed in the first half of the 19th century, the new development can be characterized as the turn from inorganic to organic phosphates, from the substance of minerals and strong chemical interactions to the components in which phosphate groups remained combined with carbon-containing substances.