Favorite piece of trivia?

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Mine is definitely that Sinemet is Latin for something like "without throwing up"

The story is something like this:
  • Doses of L-dopa had to be quite high in order to overcome peripheral dopa decarboxylase
  • High doses of L-dopa caused tons of nausea
  • Adding carbidopa reduced required doses of L-dopa thus reducing nausea
  • SIn emet.

Pretty cool. What other pieces of pharmacy/drug/medical trivia do you know of?
 
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Rapamycin (aka sirolimus) named after Rapa Nui (Easter Island) where the molecule was discovered.

Kyprolis (carfilzomib) named after Philip Whitcome and wife Carla, who both died of cancer. Philip Whitcome founded the company that originated the molecule.

asunaprevir named after Li-Qiang Sun, the originating chemist

dasatinib (Sprycel) named after Jagabandhu Das, a research fellow.

darunavir named after Dr. Arun Ghosh at Purdue.






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Not drug related, but a lot of the Latin etymologies are interesting. Reproductive system, exempla gratia:
‘vagina’ (pronounced wah-gee-nah, but spelled the same) would literally be ‘scabbard’ to an ancient Roman. That would be what you sheath your sword in, for those who never played D&D.
‘testicle’ essentially means ‘little witness’. Ha, how great is that? Sees everything!
 
As an organic chemist, I would hope all pharmacists would have heard about eutectic mixtures during ochem lab. From my teaching days, however, I don’t kid myself about how much the material actually “sticks” long term.
it is one of my "go to" random trivia questions- nearly everybody gets it wrong - now if I was back near St Louis - everybody should get it! (bonus points if you know why someone from st louis would know this)
 
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Are eutectic mixtures not commonly taught in pharmacy school? They were definitely part of one of my P1 classes and we went over them in compounding a few times with menthol and camphor

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I just like saying the word “eutetic” plus our pt’s use it all the time for port access so that’s [emoji106][emoji106]


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