Organic compounds can be produced only by living organisms using a special vital force.

Early chemistry divided substances associated with living organisms from the mineral world. Organic compounds seemed unusually complex, and many chemists believed their formation required a special vital force available only inside living bodies.

In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler heated ammonium cyanate and obtained urea—a compound strongly associated with animal physiology—from materials that did not require a living organism.

The experiment later became a symbol of vitalism’s collapse, but the historical change was not instantaneous. One synthesis did not convince every chemist that the whole living–nonliving divide had disappeared.

What mattered was the growing sequence of successes that followed. More organic compounds were synthesized, reaction mechanisms became understandable in ordinary chemical terms, and chemists eventually produced molecules unknown in nature as well as copies of natural substances.

Modern organic chemistry therefore refers primarily to carbon chemistry, not to compounds that can only be made by life.

The correction is specifically chemical. It does not imply that every property of a living organism can already be reproduced from simple ingredients or that biology contains no emergent complexity.