Carbon-based life....

In college it was known simply as "O chem"--for pre-med students, the most feared and despised class of them all--organic chemistry, the chemistry of life. If you didn't get an A in this class, med school was simply not in your future. Some people took it twice, thrice--only to be defeated by its fearsome complexity.

In retrospect it's not clear to me what the issue was with this subject matter. At the time we had no "peripheral brains" and had to memorize the structures of all those alcohols, aldehydes, and carbon rings. Now we can look them up. I think it was simply a test of determination, will, and memory...a method with which to "weed out" those whom the lords of medicine thought were not of the right stuff. Like any such test, the material itself was secondary to the process by which one learned it. And tested on it--those tests were strewn with the bodies and souls of would-be doctors across the land. Waterloo was but a trifle compared to the O chem final.
Now it makes so much sense to me--the material, not the use of O chem as a terrible winnower.
I hope my students feel the same....