Quinine (Antimalarial bitter pill)
23rd June 2006
I’ve mentioned this in the past as one of the canonical bitter compounds. It was originally extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree. It has been found useful in the treatment of malaria. The scope of malaria’s effects is both broad and amazing. According to a citation in Wikipedia, malaria infects 350-500M individuals annually - for reference, this is roughly 6-8% of the world! The vast majority of infections are in African children.
Antimalarial drugs, then, are a godsend. One of the most famous natural products ever, quinine was extracted from cinchona for years, and finally synthesized by Bob Woodward in 1944. The pharmaceutical and chemical industry would look incredibly different today if this man had never existed. You can see a picture of him at Dylan’s Tenderblog. He is the one on the right, smoking the cigarette next to the flask of the toxic and/or flammable chemicals. Amazingly, RB Woodward’s total synthesis of quinine takes up only one page in a journal. It would be slightly longer today. With more pictures. Here’s a picture:
Quinine was passed over for chloroquine, a closely related compound, for drug use for years, but resistance has driven us back to quinine!
Considering the gravity of the malaria situation, it’s not surprising opinions are a bit strong. More than a few people have suggested the restrictions on DDT have indirectly caused many malarial deaths. As you can imagine, after-the-fact analyses of this are difficult and opinions run strong on both sides of the fence.
Quinine also apparently played a role in the early development of the never-proven-but-go-ahead-and-spend-$10-on-5mL-of-distilled-water if-you-like-I’m-not-stopping-you technique of homeopathy. It also is present in tonic water; this is what gives it the bitter taste (and also what makes your drink fluoresce blue on a sunny day).
Image public domain, sourced from Wikipedia
An aside: my favorite DDT memory is of a medchem professor from the department wandering into the lab I was visiting for a summer and reciting a poem about DDT. I had no idea poems about organochlorine insecticides existed before this, and this, of course, only strengthened my love of chemistry:
A mosquito was heard to complain
That a chemist had poisoned his brain
The cause of his sorrow
Was paradichloro
Diphenyltrichloroethane.
Be happy in your work! Have a good weekend!
June 27th, 2006 at 4:46 am
That’s not any poem, that’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry)
June 27th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
My personal favorite geek-limerick is:
A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction:
The alcohol boils
Through old magnet coils.
She says that it’s “proof by induction.”