I was doing some honest-to-God-work-related web searching today when I stumbled across a page titled Taste of Raspberries, Taste of Death. You know I had to bookmark that sucker for later...
Turns out it is an account of a 1937 incident where a drug company marketed the antibiotic sulfanilamide as an elixir made with diethylene glycol.
Uh-huh, that diethylene glycol. (Yes, you do know diethylene glycol, though you may know it as "the poisonous stuff in antifreeze that tastes good so dogs will drink it and die.") Ooops. Talk about the wrong solvent to be using for an elixir.
I'm not trying to make light of it, actually. More than 100 people died after having taken the drug, and the chemist who'd formulated the original elixir committed suicide.
It is a sad, albeit interesting story, presented here in the context of how the tragedy of the day spurred on the enactment of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, giving the FDA some teeth.
Posted by Nic at February 9, 2005 05:31 PM