Many of you have this in your homes. If you have those slow-dissolving tablets that leave a bleachy smell in your water, there’s a good chance you have N-chloro-N-bromo-dimethylhydantoin in one of those giant tablets in your toilet tank.

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I was curious about this one after seeing it in the grocery and drugstore so many times. Docosanol, or Abreva, is apparently an effective treatment for herpes labialis (cold sores). It is one of the most boring structures you can imagine, and probably one of the only drugs to have its IUPAC name as its common generic name:

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Sorry to punt again but I’m just getting home. Today’s molecule is carboxymethylcellulose. It is made from cellulose by its reaction with chloroacetic acid.

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So, as we mentioned yesterday, good old Thomas Midgley had made quite a mess of things with his organolead snafu. By way of apology, he gave us CFCs. Why would we want them?

To make a refrigerator, you need a gas that can go pretty easily between liquid and gas - so, something with a near-room temperature boiling point at atmospheric pressure. If you’re a chemist, you’re thinking: ether, anhydrous ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and a bunch of other nasties. That was, in fact, the stuff we used first (Well, not ether. But loads of SO2 and NH3). Trouble was, it was so toxic it kept killing people. We needed something that balanced volatility with low toxicity.

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Here is another distinctly unfriendly-looking molecule, arsphenamine. For 30-40 brutish years, this was our single best treatment for syphilis. We owe this distinct pleasure to Paul Ehrlich, father of chemotherapy (coined the term, along with “Magic Bullet.”) In the early 20th century, he was working on histology, or staining cells. He reasoned that if we had compounds that stained only certain types of cells, maybe we could find one that would kill certain cells. Like syphilis spirochetes.

While this was a primitive theory of selectivity, Elrich used it to good effect, and six hundred five dead ends later, he released arsphenamine upon the world:

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Molecule of the Day will not be seen as scheduled this Saturday, May 6th due to the author’s heartbreaking failure to synthesize soap scum from bar soap and epsom salts, leaving me with nothing to report today. (Nice way to kill an hour and dirty up your kitchen, though). Plus, I have a pound (454g) of epsom salts. What do I do with this? Wait until I’m 80, then take baths in it?

On a sadder note, two days ago was the anniversary of the Kent State Shootings (Wikipedia, Google News), and 8-9 days from now is the anniversary of the Jackson State Shootings (Wikipedia, Google News - not much there for another week or so, of course). We hear less and less about these every year.

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So, yesterday was Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate, or SDS. Today is the carboxylic acid analogue, or lauric acid. This is just a twelve-carbon, aliphatic, unsaturated carboxylic acid. One big difference between it and SDS is that it can form an insoluble complex with divalent metal ions like magnesium and calcium. This is, of course, soap scum. Follow that link! If you are one of those unfortunate souls who has soft water, you can make your own soap scum at home.

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First in the series on soaps and detergents is sodium dodecyl sulfate - or SDS. This is one of the first molecules we’ve talked about where the structure is pretty intuitive from the name. “Sodium,” obviously, implies that there is a sodium hanging around. “Dodecyl,” if you remember your Greek prefixes, means 12. Here, this means a twelve-atom chain of carbons. Finally, the “sulfate” here means that there is a sulfate group attached to the molecule. The structure:

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Here is a molecule you’ve probably used, especially if you happen to be of that type of person who never does laundry. Cyclodextrin is what’s known as an cyclic oligomer of glucose molecules. The cyclic part means that it forms a ring, and “oligomer” means a repeating series of the same molecule. It’s different from a polymer in that it’s smaller. The difference between “oligomer” and “polymer” is not well-defined, but a good general rule is: if you can count the number of monomers (glucose subunits), it’s probably better termed “oligomer.” This is the structure of glucose:

The important thing to note here is that there are a number of hydroxyl groups (-OH) bound to carbon. The bond between carbon and oxygen is quite polar, as is that between oxygen and hydrogen. This means that it will tend to dissolve in polar liquids — water! So, this isn’t that much of a surprise: sugar dissolves in water.

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