If you’re a manufacturer of medicines, thinking up a suitably snappy name for (2S)-1-[(2S)-6-amino-2-{[(1S)-1-carboxy-3-phenylpropyl]amino}hexanoyl]pyrrolidine-2-carboxylic acid [generic name Lisinopril] might not be an easy task. And, according to a recent paper in the journal Names : A Journal of Onomastics, Volume 66, Issue 2, 2018, picking the ‘wrong’ name can make a huge difference to your […]
Tag: drug
A further delay in the arrival of a universal drug creation machine
The new great attempt to make a machine that can conveniently make and deliver any —any — kind of drug has hit a snag. The previous great attempt, by two-time Ig Nobel Prize winner Jacques Benveniste, hit a snag two decades ago, and never got unsnagged. The Retraction Watch blog sums up the new case: Paper claiming […]
Assessing the taste of medicine
This study probes in some detail the sentiment that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”: “The bad taste of medicines: overview of basic research on bitter taste,” Julie A. Mennella [pictured here], Alan C. Spector, Danielle R. Reed, and Susan E. Coldwell, Clinical therapeutics, vol. 35, no. 8 (2013): 1225-1246. The authors, […]
Comparative death counts: Marijuana vs. water
There’s news about the literally grave danger that a feared drug might pose for someone somewhere some day. Details are in a new study. The study describes two persons who died from no obvious cause, and who—the doctors conclude — therefore must have died from the unknown amounts of marijuana that they are likely to […]