Reactions

Chirality is Just Turtles All the Way Down

L-DOPA is the best drug we have for Parkinson’s disease. If you take L-DOPA and reflect it in a mirror, you get a different molecule: D-DOPA, which does absolutely nothing for Parkinson’s and causes potentially deadly side effects. Making just L-DOPA without D-DOPA is surprisingly hard – so hard that the person who finally figured out how to do it won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Chirality is Just Turtles All the Way Down

12m 2s

  • How an HIV Miracle Drug Vanished: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    How an HIV Miracle Drug Vanished

    E1 - 9m 47s

    In 1998, a pharmaceutical company suddenly lost the ability to make their lifesaving HIV drug at one of its production facilities. Then that failure spread to the company’s analysis labs. Then it spread to the other production facility, and within months the lifesaving drug had effectively vanished from the entire planet. And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.

  • Everyone is Wrong About Mexican Coke (Even Johnny Harris): asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Everyone is Wrong About Mexican Coke (Even Johnny Harris)

    S10 E16 - 9m 36s

    Mexican Coke tastes different than American Coke; after all, it’s sweetened using cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until 2011, when a paper published in the journal Obesity found that Mexican Coke contained no cane sugar. Instead, the authors found plenty of glucose and fructose, which are the main ingredients in high-fructose corn syrup.

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