Fun Facts About GalChimia

1. Catalytic surface. In heterogeneous catalysis, surface is everything. The catalysts used inside a car catalytic converter have a surface that spread would cover about three football pitches.

2. Cyclosporin. This compound, which is an immunosuppressant drug key to avoid the risk of organ rejection, was discovered in samples of soil taken in Norway.

3. Aspartame. This popular sweetener was accidentally discovered in 1965 by James M. Schlatter when he licked his finger, which had become contaminated with aspartame. The aspartame was in fact an intermediate in the search of an anti-ulcer drug candidate.

4. The CFCs, now banned due to the risk for the ozone layer, were presented to the American Chemical Society as non-flammable refrigerants. The demonstration involved a chemist taking a mouthful of a CFC and spraying it over a flame. Don’t do this at home !

5. Teflon, which became popular as an antiadherent coating in cookware during the 60s, was in fact discovered during the WWII and used for holding the highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride during the Manhattan Project.

6. The first chiral resolution was carried out by Louis Pasteur using a magnifying glass and ‘pinzas’. He tediously separated the crystals of synthetic sodium ammonium tartrate and demonstrated that they behaved differently under a polarized light beam. He deduced the molecule in question was asymmetric and could exist in two different forms.