Saccharin: Chemist working on coal tar derivatives noticed a sweet taste on his hand from contamination.
Aspartame: Chemist working on anti-ulcer drugs discovers his finger's taste sweet when he licked them to turn a page.
Sucralose: Chemist working on novel uses of sucrose and synthetic derivatives asked a coworker to 'test' a compound. Coworker thought he said, 'Taste'.
Tasting unknown chemicals can't always end so well can it?
Reminded me of these entertaining columns: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/11/11/th...
"Say what? I’d call for all the chemists who’ve ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio"
They're all educational and very entertaining, even to a non-chemist like myself. Recommended for a chuckle, there are some really awful compounds he covers with wit.
Edit 1: original link de-borked.
Edit 2: full list of his 'things I won't work with' columns https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...
a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT. Yes, this is an example of something that becomes less explosive as a one-to-one cocrystal with TNT. Although, as the authors point out, if you heat those crystals up the two components separate out, and you’re left with crystals of pure CL-20 soaking in liquid TNT, a situation that will heighten your awareness of the fleeting nature of life.
"At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature."
further on
"The paper goes on to react FOOF [dioxygen difluoride] with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth...), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."
"But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three?" [1]
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/th...
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/21/1960s-rock-musi...