Grand challenges in inorganic chemistry: Toward better life quality and a more sustainable world

Abstract

Initially limited to the study of minerals, salts, and oxides, inorganic chemistry (IC) emerged as a major actor in technology and sciences during the second part of the last century. Sulfuric and phosphoric acids, ammonia, lime, and hydraulic cement, for instance, are among the top-20 most manufactured chemicals. Electronic industry and solar energy conversion rely on various forms of highly pure silicon while more sophisticated compounds are vital to medical diagnosis, imaging and therapy, not to mention catalysts which are indispensable in industrial chemistry. On a more fundamental level, inorganic compounds intervene in biological processes and the knowledge of their structure and reactivity is crucial to the understanding of associated biochemical reactions (Rebilly and Reinaud, 2012). Highly sophisticated functional materials often contain metal ions and are assembled following the principles of metallosupramolecular chemistry (Ariga et al., 2012). These are only a few examples of the ubiquitous roles played by inorganic chemistry. Although IC has presently grown up to a high level of sophistication, there are still many scientific issues to be resolved and future perspectives and needs are highly challenging. In the following, we concentrate on three major aspects only.