Whipped Cream Difficulties

Some reactions have to be run at very low temperatures. This is one of them. If you mix this stuff together at room temperature your internal organs would be found in several time zones.

—“OMG! We Made One Gram of Remdesivir!” by Josh Bloom.

tl,dr; Remdesivir is one of the more promising drugs for coronavirus. It is also a king hell b—h to synthesize.

You could do a lot worse than browse through some of Mr. Bloom’s other articles if you’re bored, especially the ones about meth chemistry and fentanyl. We’ve all heard of fentanyl and some of us have probably heard of carfentanil. But have you ever heard of ohmefentanyl?

Two simple modifications—the addition of one methyl group and one hydroxyl group (blue circles)— makes the molecule 6.3 times more potent than carfentanil, 126-times more so than fentanyl, and 6,300 times more than morphine. This is just nuts. Doing the math, the estimated lethal dose of ohmefentanyl is 0.16 micrograms, which means that one poppy seed’s worth (300 micrograms) of ohmefentanyl is enough to kill 1900 people.

(I know some of these are a couple of years old. I only discovered Mr. Bloom and the ACSH site over the weekend, when Hacker News linked to his Remdesivir article.)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2020 at 11:18 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.