Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Monday, March 30, 2026
fluorouracil and its cousins (fluoropyrimidine)
Years ago, when I started this project, I wondered about pyrimidine antivirals.
It turns out such things do exist. Fluorouracil and its cousins are used as chemotherapy drugs, antifungals, and antivirals. I wonder what effects a dimer version of fluorouracil would have.
chlorhexidine, proguanil, and metformin comparison
The chain with five nitrogen atoms is intriguing feature of all three. One could almost say that chlorhexidine (a disinfectant) is made from two proguanil molecules connected with a carbon chain.
abacavir, cladribine, and fludarabine comparison
The first is a medication for HIV, and the other two are chemotherapy drugs. The nitrogen double ring (purine-like) is an intriguing feature of all three.
cocaine, scopolamine, and hyoscine butyl bromide comparison
The nitrogen ring is very similar on all three. I wonder what effects cocaine butyl bromide would have. What would happen if cocaine was made to be more like scopolamine or vice-versa?
ivermectin, nystatin, amphotericin b, paclitaxel, and rifapentine comparison
Their molecular weights are similar, and they all have a large central ring. The antifungals nystatin and amphotericin b only differ in minor ways.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
The Fable of the Sun People and the Ice People - non-racist version
Below is the original version:
That story is an awful thing to tell children. It's racist, silly, and wrong. Here's my version:
***
Today, there are people spread over the world, but long ago, that was not so. Everybody lived in the same place now called Africa. It was mostly hot and dry, and people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. As time went by, there were more people, and so they began to spread all over the world: hot places, cold places, mountains, valleys, plains, next to rivers, by the ocean, and on islands. Everywhere they went, they came to have their own language and their own ways. But overall, people were mostly the same everywhere. There were good people and bad people, tall and short, smart and dumb, good-looking and ugly, and everything in between.
The people who settled in Europe, we'll call them the ice people, because they had ice in the winter. The people who stayed in Africa, we'll call them the sun people, because it was sunny and hot there most of the time. As time went on, the people in both places switched from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. That meant more food, so soon there were more people in both places. The difference was that Europe was smaller, so it got crowded faster and people fought more. There was also fighting in Africa, but not as much because it was less crowded.
A few hundred years ago, the ice people started building big boats and sailed across the oceans to places all over the world. They were searching for more land to settle. The sun people did not build big boats because there was plenty of land already where they were. One day, the ice people sailed to the land of the sun people. By this time, the ice people had gotten very good at fighting, taking land, and bossing people around, so that's what they did to the sun people. Things went on like that for a very long time until there were some wars so big that the ice people finally got tired of fighting and let the sun people have their land back.
Even though the ice people and the sun people still sometimes fight, most of them want to get along because they remember how bad things used to be.
***
The above is also an oversimplification, but it's way closer to the truth than the original fable.
The best story for teaching children about how racism is dumb and wrong is this:
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
cladribine, fludarabine, and zidovudine comparison
The first two are chemotherapy drugs, and the other is a medication for AIDS. It's interesting how they all have a furan-like group. The first two only differ by a few atoms.
aciclovir and tenofovir disoproxil comparison
It's interesting that these two antivirals have such similar structures. What would be the effect of adding a double-bonded oxygen to the larger ring of tenofovir disoproxil and relocating the amine group? In other words, making the larger ring the same as aciclovir?
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
entecavir, aciclovir, and cladribine comparison
The first two are antivirals and the third one is a leukemia medication. I have my usual questions:
Can they all be used to treat the same things?
Can new medicines be made by making one more like the other?
There are many medicines and useful chemicals based on purine.
suggested reading
proguanil and metformin compared
Proguanil is used to treat malaria, and metformin is a diabetes medication.
It's interesting how they both have almost the same nitrogen chain. I'm wondering if making one more like the other could lead to a new medicine. Can proguanil be used to treat diabetes? Can metformin be used to treat malaria?
It seems easier and safer to try to make new medicines from existing ones rather than starting from scratch. Once penicillin was isolated, the race was on to find new antibiotics from mold.
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