22 While we wait for Dr. James J. La Clair to get around to answering those questions below (not… holding… breath…) (nevermind, he’s still here) let’s move on with the bloggotronix and hit up the lately 
forgotten Drug Sunday! In keeping with the theme of controversies, I found an interesting one with the modern plague, HIV. The combination of the extraordinary immaturity of the two initial discoverers of the HIV virus, Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier and the absurd claims of formerly respected cellular biologist Peter Duesberg, have created a science melodrama which one could easily fall in love with. According to Duesberg, HIV is the net result of being gay and doing amyl nitrites to loosen up your pooper, doing methamphetamines and then a few nostrils full of cocaine and finally the damn AZT you take because you get sick from all your gayness and drugs. In a nutshell, if you would just STOP BEING GAY DRUG ADDICTS YOUR AIDS WOULD GO AWAY. Naturally Peter Duesberg took a lot of shit for this. All this got me thinking about a drug Duesberg considers a primary culprit of HIV, Retrovir (AZT), ironically the first drug used to treat HIV (it actually isn’t ironic at all, when you learn the full history).
AZT looks an awful lot like thymidine, doesn’t it? That’s what it hopes your dumb ol’ cells think too when they take it on up. The idea is that the Azido group makes the sucker more lipophilic so it enters into the various membranes. Once it gets incorporated into the reverse transcriptase machinery the loss of the hydroxyl means no more chain elongation and thus it terminates the growing chain. (As you know, the chain growth is a result of forming a new Phosphodiester bond across those alcohols in thymidine.) This would ideally stop cell proliferation in cancer cells, but it didn’t… so it was shelved after being discovered in the 60’s. The original Big Evil Pharma, Glaxo Wellcome, stumbled upon the drug in the 1980’s. Since then it has been maliciously saving lives. [ This, more than anything, gave the drug industry a black eye. It is generally looked down upon when you refuse to sell a life saving medication to a country because they can't afford it, - especially when it was discovered using federal grant money. HUGE PR nightmare.] Anyway, HIV is an RNA virus so it must first convert the RNA to DNA and it does so using its own brand of reverse transcriptase, which is carries along in its capsid. There you have it, an awesome antiviral. It totally screws up the viral reverse transcriptase by clogging it up with what the poor little guy thought was a thymidine. It does, however, fuck you up a little in the process.
In 2004 AZT raked in 1.8 billion dollars and is enjoyed in every corner of the world. It is now available as a generic. You can make your own, actually. It’s pretty easy to make, if you have some D-Mannitol handy.
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Alkyne, nitrile, isonitrile… azide? Where is the creativity? Uncle Al eagerly anticipates Homeland Severity confiscating AZT as a terrorist explosive at airports. Isonitrile subsititution would be particularly pretty given their olifactory stigma. Remember Martin Luther’s Third Thesis:
“Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh”
Kyle,
This (and the others like it) is great stuff. I hope you can keep up the good work. Plus, if you can get Uncle Al to quote Martin Luther you’ve really arrived!!!!
That’s an interesting quote, Kilroy. I read that back before I had a blog on Dylan’s Tenderbutton, which apparently is giving its two week notice. Just after Dylan had “arrived” because of Uncle Al’s presence, his blog exploded… it sorta makes me reflect. I’m partial to the notion of blogging, but the ACS turned me on to a notion that I hadn’t really considered… what if blogging isn’t the future of chemistry? I have long been an apostle for the future of peer reviewed chemistry as an unrestrained anonymous system of not 10 or 20 or even 100 people gathered to discuss and dismiss or embrace chemistry, but as a system in which 1000’s do. This site, during the ACS, was getting 2500 hits a day and, I know as well as you do, it’s not because of the awesome chemistry at the ACS, it’s because of J. J. La Clair. Just a quick look at the Google search queries shows me that more than 70% of the people that come from Google are here because they were looking for dirt on Bengu Sezen or Hexacyclinol.
While I’m happy to talk about these “scandals” in a pseudo-quasi-scientific way with humor interspersed, the reason this blog was even created was to profile literature for my own amusement. Instead, it’s existence (rather, popularity) seems to be owed to voyeurism more so than chemistry and in that respect the comments, the replies and everything I’ve written to fuel a fire I was mystified by have become an embarrassment, which is no one’s fault but my own for not considering the scope of what this blog had become and how many people had begun to read it. In that regard, I apologize to those I may have offended.
In short, I’ve reflected since the ACS. I’m determined to return this blog to its roots – one of reviewing otherwise ignored literature and to challenge myself to read things outside of my ‘comfort zone.’ No more scandal, no more intrigue, no more extensive 5 day coverage of Bengu Sezen’s latest smelly fart. And, in the process of returning to obscure and interesting chemistry, I hope to get readership back down to something below 1000 hits a day. This is The Chem Blog, after all, not the New York Post. Besides, bandwidth doesn’t grow on trees.
The number one search query for my site is “chemistry forum”.
You should register that domain name and redirect traffic to fix your google problem.
http://www.reformed.org/docume.....heses.html
“Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” 1517
It’s as much an inflated load of crap as is that which it criticizes. The beginning is fun as the well is poisoned. Sips thereafter are bile. Luther wanted a German Yahweh franchise to keep money local. Others had attempted such, but Luther was the first vulgate spammer. Newly hatched printing presses plastered German villages with advertising in their own gutteral patois. A copy of any polemic eventually got to Rome, pissed off the Pope, and was condemned. By that time Luther had churned out a thousand copies of his next polemic.
It’s not unlike the politics of HIV – money, power, Media leverage, and the mob. See who is making a buck. There’s your problem!
Rational intellectualism force fit into sprituality renders the Church of Rome a constant fool. The Eastern Orthodox Church is vastly less offensive for being mystic rather than rational. EO Hell is absolutely awesome!
All folks go to heaven without delay, judgement, or exception. Those who have embraced God forever exult, suffused for eternity with His infinitely luminous Love. Those who have denied God burn in it.
The cure for HIV is to let it do its job unmolested. Each poxy pederast and drug user burns in an exquisitely tailored Hell of personal responsibility.
Kyle, it’s interesting that you write that. While the scandal posts are “negative” items and I can see how it’s depressing that these stories are what gathers the lionshare of attention/traffic on chemistry blogs, I still think it’s really important to discuss them. To varying degrees, it seems a lot of things that are considered “business as usual” in research are unethical and should be pointed out and corrected. Nothing scares vermin like shining a light on them. It burns me up that Sames and Sezen soiled the literature and remain unpunished for doing so. Unfortunately, it seems like this story is dying, which sends an awful message to potential fraudsters and apathetically negligent scientists.
You’re right, it’s certainly a good thing to shed light on dishonest behavior, it makes people think better of it in the future. Though, that’s not what I set out to do with this blog. That’s not to say, I’m not going to blog about controversy, it’s just that I’m not going to dwell on it like I did with Sezen and La Clair.
I gotta say, do you think that we’ll have something Sezen or La Clair in the next three or four years? It’s my opinion that we (as academic organic chemists) have had our share of scandal for the next half-decade or so.
Good lord, I hope so.
There is always someone else. Big events in small lives so to speak.
Mitch
Good for you. I enjoy the chemistry side of it, and while it is good to, as another poster put it, “shine light on the vermin”, dwelling on it will only make you look bad in the end. Point out the tumor, hope it gets cut out, but then go back to everyday life, which is, in this case, discussions centered around our love of playing God.
Kyle,
I’m glad to hear that. One of the reasons I love this blog and Dylan’s is that it gives me a chance to “discuss” or be a (usually silent) participant in an intellectual discussion about org synth and related topics. However, it is not a dry, emotionless discussion. There is life to it. It brings back many memories of grad school and the discussions we would have about a paper while rotovapping (is that the proper verb form?) toluene or 2000 mL of hexanes. Why do we do this? Because this is what we enjoy.
The problem is that many third world countries, where AIDS epidemic is rampant can’t afford these drugs
I really don’t see what the point of supplying them with life extending drugs would be. If they live longer, they’ll just infect more people, so it seems like the best thing to do is actually hasten the disease.
You know, you’re kind of a dickhead.
Interesting to read your comments about HIV and AZT. I think you’ll find though that, if you check medical literature carefully, in practice it doesn’t act as a DNA chain inhibitor to any appreciable degree, because it needs to be triphosphorylated first to be able to do that, and that barely happens. Instead its toxicity comes from its potent oxidising effect, among others. Not only were the trials that resulted in its approval fraudulent, but it was approved partly on the basis of a claim that it was 1000 times less toxic to ordinary cells than ones with HIV in. This has subsequently proved to be false, meaning that it is 1000 times more toxic to non-infected cells than was previously claimed. The warning label on laboratory versions warns that it targets blood and bone marrow, thus destroying your ability to breathe and your immune system at the same time. In fact the physician’s desk reference at one point said, (quoting from memory as it is not to hand), “May cause symptoms indistinguisable from AIDS”, or words to that effect. In other words, AZT can cause the symptoms of AIDS all by itself. Anyone who believes this is a life-saving drug ought to check out the literature a bit more thoroughly. Perhaps you’ve not known someone actually take this stuff and watch what happened to them.
New aids drugs (those given since 1996) are in fact corticoids. Don’t consider the chemical structure, you wouldn’t understand anything. Just consider the effect of the two kinds of drugs and compare them. You will see that these are the same effects : when you take them and when you stop them.
Medical industry has riped off us by presenting old meds (corticoids) as new super high tech new meds.
Yeah, we’re all just a bunch of dumb chemists. What would we know about chemical structures?
A real scientist doesn’t take things personnaly.
However. There are two reasons why such a thing could be possible.
1) Pharmaceutic industry is lying about the chemical formula of those drugs. They present them as protease inhibitors or reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and it is a lie. They are juste corticoids.
2) Theorical chemistry is false.
As much as it pains me to feed you, I do have to ask where you learned this from.
I am an aids dissident. I didn’t understood the causes of the health problems that had the dissidents who stopped Haart. So I have search the reason of these problems.
For some reasons, I have studied the effects of corticoids. And those effects are the same than the meds presented as Haart (protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors) : when you take them, and when you stop taking them.
Pharmaceutic industry can lie about the real nature of those drugs, but they can’t lie about their clinical effects. This is their Achilles’ heel.
In the url box, I have put a link to the topic I have written about this subject on the aids dissident forum AidsMyth Exposed.