Acetanilide

I already did. Video will be posted in a few weeks

Nile Red

Yes, sorry for the mistake! Then, why don't you make some Sulfanilamide :) ?

Yeah, I believe you are right. I know it can be made from cacl2 and naoh, so that would make sense

Nile Red

Sulfonamide is just the functional group, no? Sulfanilamide is one of the simplest sulfa drugs to make (I think)

Nile Red

Why don't you make Sulfonamide? It can be easily made from acetanilide... and the way it works (it inhibits an enzyme involved in folate synthesis, but humans, in contrast to bacteria, acquire folate through the diet)

Hey, I was just tinkering around trying to make CaOH2 (lime) from egg shells and when I mixed calcium acetate with potassium hydroxide a white precipitate that I think is calcium hydroxide formed I this possible? Wouldn't it make potassium acetate, which is soluble, and calcium hydroxide?

Nice recrystallization! I think that's definitely one of your better batches of crystals.

jason black

Cool. I'll look into it! Also, thanks for your corrections. I genuinely appreciate it.

Nile Red

I found this paper from the 1940s regarding purification of lysozyme from egg whites. It's not too complicated, it involves adsorption on bentonite, elution with pyridine at given pH and dialysis against water. Should be doable in an amateur lab. <a href="http://www.jbc.org/content/157/1/43.full.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.jbc.org/content/157/1/43.full.pdf</a>

Silviu T

Oh I guess I should word it better. Sulfanilamide was he first mass produced one. I'll fix both that and your typo comment :)

Nile Red

Interesting. I never heard that before. Also, I guess it is first "true" antibiotic. As in, mass produced systemic drug.

Nile Red

What a great video. Great job!

In all honesty though, the first antibacterial agent (apart from simple bactericidal chemicals like phenol and bleach) with applications in medicine wasn't penicillin either. It was lysozyme. It was discovered in the same lab in which penicillin was discovered, by work of several scientists (Fleming included) under the direction of Sir Almroth Wright. The biography I mentioned above has some pretty funny passages on how every graduate student and lab technician had to submit periodically to the "lemon torture" and have lemon juice squeezed into the eyes in order to collect large amounts of tears - tears being at the time the only known source of relatively pure lysozyme. :) That was before they realized there is a large amount of it in the egg whites, and the torture ceased.

Silviu T

Also, penicillin actually _was_ first. It was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in the lab in 1928, but due to technical difficulties and lack of funding it didn't go into production until the 1940s. And that only due to the little thing called WWII. Prontosil was discovered in 1932. You can read all of the details in the excellent biography of Alexander Fleming by Andre Maurois.

Silviu T

Typo in the toxicities slide: not "necrotoxicity" but "nephrotoxicity" i.e. toxic to kidneys, not toxic to dead people. :)

Silviu T