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Friday, October 8, 2021
How Rat Poison Helps Chemists Win Nobel Prizes
Strychnine is so difficult to make in a lab that chemists, including Nobel winners, have long competed to synthesize it more efficiently.
Strychnine is so difficult to make in a lab that chemists, including Nobel winners, have long competed to synthesize it more efficiently.
Joshua Learn, Contributor
October 7, 2021
(Inside Science) -- Strychnine is a substance commonly deployed to keep rodents away from your kitchen.
But a whole line of Nobel Prize winners -- this year's included -- care little about strychnine's use as rat poison. They are more focused on the strychnine molecule's complex structure. "The synthesis of this naturally occurring material in the laboratory was viewed as a Mount Everest of chemical synthesis because it was just so hard," said Scott Denmark, a chemist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
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