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Author Topic: What did you invent?  (Read 351 times)

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Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: What did you invent?
« Reply #15 on: October 18, 2018, 10:12:16 AM »
When I was a child I came up with the idea of a whiskey pill.  Just add water and you had an alcoholic beverage.   :hahaha:

 
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Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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Re: What did you invent?
« Reply #16 on: October 18, 2018, 11:37:30 AM »
When I was a child I came up with the idea of a whiskey pill.  Just add water and you had an alcoholic beverage.   :hahaha:

It's been tried and it's largely a flop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder

When you start getting into the chemistry side of things, it just doesn't make sense.

Offline Lestat

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Re: What did you invent?
« Reply #17 on: October 21, 2018, 05:52:55 AM »
There are better ways to do it than encapsulation, such as forming a carbamate ester,  ideally of  a tertiary alcohol (which unlike primary and secondary alcohols, do not easily undergo oxidative metabolism to nasty carbonylated metabolites  (E.g primary alcohols such as ethanol are metabolized first to the aldehyde, and then on to the carboxylic acid, fr.ex. ethanol [the  one people usually consume] is metabolized to acetaldehyde then acetic acid, which then enters the citrate cycle (Kreb's cycle) and is metabolized eventually to CO2 with some ATP production, whilst secondary alcohols are metabolized to ketone intermediates, fr.ex isopropanol would be metabolized to acetone first. )

Tert.alcohols are a LOT harder to metabolize, and to not easily undergo oxidative addition and if th right one is picked, can be a  lot easier on the body. 2-methy-butan-2-ol was popular for a while (also known as tertiary pentanol/tert.pentyl alcohol), it smells and tastes like arse, but it's an awful lot more potent than ethanol is, rather than downing a half pint of burning liquor to get drunk, its more easily calibrated with a pipette, a couple of ml at a time, as if one were using something like a strong GHB solution. And no nasty metabolites  to give you an awful headache later or make your breath taste and smell awful (I can't stand that after-taste of acetaldehyde that comes as a result of drinking ethanol).

There are some highly potent solid alcohols too, 1-ethynylcyclohexan-1-ol is reportedly active at several hundred milligrams. Haven't tried it personally, but reports  state it to be extremely potent, although as a potential downside, depending on other medications being taken, is a fairly potent suicide inhibitor of various  hepatic cytochrome-P450 pathway enzymes which are important in detoxification and metabolism of various xenobiotics.

IIRC the carbamate derivatives  of many tertiary alcohols are barbiturate-like ligands  at GABAa (AFAIK its rather debatable how alcohol acts at GABAa, whether there is a distinct binding site or whether it acts more due to its solvent properties, diffusing into cellular  lipid bilayers, the same has been posited for a mode of action of volatile surgical anaesthetics, but I'm inclined to disbelieve that theory, at least as the be-all and end all of their properties, given that at least one fluorinated ether, very much structurally akin to surgical anaesthetics,  is a convulsant, acting as a GABAa antagonist or inverse agonist, which strongly implies a binding site rather than a generic 'solvent-ey' action on lipid bilayers, if that were the case you'd expect all similar such compounds to act the same general way, rather than have one or more oddballs that act completely the inverse)

There's plenty potential out  there by way of alcohol modifications, but IMO this lies more in choosing the correct alcohol to begin with, rather than modifying ethanol (although a carbamate might be worth trying to boost the potency, and solidify it, lower the volatility and possibly improve palatability.) Also, tertiary alcohols are better candidates, as mentioned. Also, making an alkynol with a halogen (usually chlorine, alkyl bromides and iodides are to reactive, and alkyl fluorides have the potential for some VERY unpleasant metabolites, such as fluoroacetate, a deadly, nigh untreatable metabolic poison that gets metabolized to fluorocitrate, which jams up the Kreb's cycle and simply put, throws a spanner in the works of ATP production, slamming down the breaks on cellular respiration, cumulative, targets high energy demand tissues more than the rest, as ATP is our universal cellular 'currency' of energy, and tissues such as reproductive organs, heart and brain are attacked preferentially, or at least, more damage occurs as a result.)

A good example would be to take a drug like ethchlorvynol, an oldschool sedative-hypnotic, as a template and work from that, IMO, a tertiary alcohol with a triple bond and terminal chlorine atom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethchlorvynol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Amyl_alcohol (amyl is an older synonym for the pentyl radical, this is the 2-methyl-butan-2-ol I mentioned. Quite long lasting, and much more potent than ethanol, tastes like arse however, but at least there isn't very much to get down)
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Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: What did you invent?
« Reply #18 on: October 21, 2018, 09:41:16 AM »
Hey guys.  I was about 10 years old when I had my invention idea.  Give some credit to my age.
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Offline Lestat

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Re: What did you invent?
« Reply #19 on: October 21, 2018, 10:58:29 AM »
Oh I do. It's just that Iook at the concept from a slightly different angle than you did, namely, that if you are starting with ethanol, you cannot reduce the quantity of material which one has to ingest to reach a set point, effects-wise. Encapsulation in beta-cyclodextrin or the like ADDS to the total weight. And it boils down to more or less that you can't much improve on something which was crap to begin with.  Start with garbage and all one does, usually at least, is end up with prettier looking garbage. No matter how one packages it, it's still ethanol, still prone to filthy hangovers and liver damage, etc., supplying it as ethanol-soaked starch isn't going to change the fundamental nature of the beast.

So why not start with a better candidate?

I had similar thoughts as a kid, actually, GHB (really, really simple, just addition of stoichiometric quantity of NaOH to gamma-butyrolactone and heating together for a bit then evaporating) as an alcohol substitute was one of my very first bioactive type experiments.) Alright, it did end up on the ceiling (and everywhere else in the kitchen) once, but still...

(god only knows how I kept THAT one under wraps, the time it literally hit the ceiling, after a boilover caused the reaction to flash boil off a lower BP solvent I was  experimenting with in order to shorten the production time per kg, as it leaves behind a lot of H2O that needs evaporating off, tried running it in IIRC, THF,  only to forget, as a rank beginner at the time, to account for the exotherm on adding the caustic. Whole thing took off like a bloody rocket, painting the kitchen with GBL, which stinks something foul, like burning rubber car tyres.  Spent most of the night mopping it up off the floor, walls, kitchen fittings, the ones it hadn't eaten,  ceiling, and venting the stink hoping the folks wouldn't realize :autism:

Still managed  to recover a fair bit though, not the full kg, but a fair sized bag full, after recrystallizing it.
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