The book offered to the reader was written by a famous American scientist, science fiction writer and popularizer of science and is a logical continuation of the book "The World of Carbon" published in 1978 in Russian. The author talks about organic compounds, the molecule of which, in addition to carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, necessarily includes nitrogen. The range of these compounds is very large - from amino acids and proteins to dyes, they play a huge role both in the living world and in industry.