Warfare
moleculeoftheday | September 10, 2008The ubiquitous active ingredient in insect repellent, DEET, is a great solvent. Anyone who's spent much time outdoors has discovered this empirically, as he's inevitably seen it fog polycarbonate glasses, dissolve a gear sack, or destroy $500 raingear.
DEET-based insect repellents come in a variety of strengths, from 10-25% creams, to bottles of pure DEET. It's probably the only organic solvent that comes in a bottle designed for intentional skin application:
For quite awhile, the presumed mechanism of action for DEET was blocking the receptor for things like octenol. Just last month in…
moleculeoftheday | August 15, 2006Whew. This one's a little embarassing. One of my favorite things about organic chemistry is just how much it's like Lego. Molecules that seem like indecipherable structures to the uninitiated start looking more and more like a bunch of building blocks. It's been said that organic chemistry is the chemistry of functional groups, and it's quite true. Chemists have to worry about the whole molecule, but any one operation is likely to work on one or two bits or pieces of the molecule at a time. This kind of thinking can be a bit dangerous, since sometimes a building block you dream up -…