Word: chemists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They look like heroin, they act like heroin, and they satisfy an addict's urge just like the real thing. But when subjected to a chemist's scrutiny, the narcotics that have been flooding California turn out to be something else. They are "designer drugs"--designed, that is, to get around...
Police in Orange County, Calif., first encountered designer drugs in 1979, when they found two young addicts lying dead near samples of a heroin-like powder. Thirteen more users had died before Forensic Chemist Donald Cooper of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration managed to identify the substance. It was a designer version of the anesthetic fentanyl, which is widely used during prolonged surgery. The variant was many times as powerful as heroin; just a little could be an overdose...
...case of a Maryland graduate student who had developed Parkinson's symptoms after injecting himself with a home-brewed opiate. The student had been trying to produce MPPP, a substance similar to the pain-killer Demerol, but had accidentally created a related chemical called MPTP. Langston asked Stanford University Chemist Ian Irwin to test the samples for the drug. Sure enough, MPTP was there...
...seemingly incongruous occupations. Christopher Marlowe was a government spy, Henry Fielding a criminal-court justice, Franz Kafka an insurance-company clerk and Herman Melville a customs inspector. Among living writers, Primo Levi has held perhaps the most improbable job. For two decades the Italian author worked as a commercial chemist, analyzing resins and rock samples for makers of varnish and other products. Can literature spring from such mundane matter? Chemistry would seem as impenetrable to the literary imagination as lead...
When Greene became chairman of Hybritech, Inc., in January 1979, it consisted of little more than a name and some rented lab space in La Jolla. "We had a cell biologist, a protein chemist, a secretary and somebody to clean the animal cages," says Greene, "and that was about it. We had $300,000, but it looked like we were going to run dry by August...