10 ms·
Too much serendipity
- imzadi 3y agoWhat I learned from this is never eat at a pot luck full of chemists.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side: > Molecular structures of sucrose and aspartame, looking very different I can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”. They don’t taste the same. Aspartame has a very nasty aftertaste as compared to sucrose.
- imglorp 3y agoYes, to my taste, all the sweeteners have an aftertaste and an odor including stevia.
- cgh 3y agoRe stevia, apparently how you taste it is determined by how sensitive your bitter taste receptors happen to be. It’s somehow also related to why some people can’t stand cilantro, for example. For me, stevia is simply sweet with no aftertaste so I guess I’m lucky in this regard.
- wccrawford 3y agoStevia? My wife has much stronger bitter receptors than most people (including me, and I thought mine were strong) but Stevia is fine for her. Aspartame, though, she absolutely despises. I think they're both fine, but I can pick up a hint of what she dislikes from Aspartame. Sucralose is also fine for both of us.
- bityard 3y agoYou are! As one who identifies as keto, I have experience with a wide range of artificial sweeteners. Stevia is one of my favorites but I can definitely taste the bitterness. Which is why I only use it either in combination with other sweeteners (e.g. Erythritol), or in places where only a slight amount of sweetness is desired. Edit: I just had a thought: are we talking about putting it in coffee here? Because the bitterness of coffee and the bitterness of Stevia are pretty close and I can see the former masking the latter easily.
- fellowniusmonk 3y agoMonk Fruit/Stevia liquid sweeteners (sans erythritol) are my go to for coffee and any slightly bitter food for this very reason.
- cgh 3y agoAstounding fact: I have never had a cup of coffee in my life.
- nerdponx 3y agoStevia and monkfruit both taste awful to me. Not bitter specifically, but unpleasant in a way that I can't really describe, and do not at all enjoy eating. It also tends to make my stomach hurt. Meanwhile I have no problem with cilantro or cucumbers.
- zetsurin 3y agoOh cool, I find cilantro to taste bad! Stevia less so, but I don't like it. Is Aspartame the same (I also find it to have an aftertaste)?
- johnchristopher 3y agoI wonder if people have different genetic predispositions that influences how sugar taste to them. Like I have with cilantro (a bit, a tiny tiny bit is okayish but more than that and it's.. ugh... it's not even soap it's.. bleh..).
- FergusArgyll 3y agoI loved the writing but I don't get the point or the title. Am I supposed to infer some sort of conspiracy theory? or is it just supposed to be funny?
- ElevenLathe 3y agoI don't think it's meant to imply a conspiracy, rather that lab safety around novel compounds is probably not as tight as people assume it is. I will put forth another (possible) explanation: fake sugar has to be widely marketed, and "we were doing Important Science when we accidentally discovered this fake sugar" is a more marketable, easy-to-understand story than "we added/removed groups on a range of compounds determined likely to be sweet based on a literature review, in order of how amenable the reactions are to mass production, then tested each of them in rats".
- cmyr 3y agoI don't think there's some huge point beyond exploring an interesting question, and raising it in a forum where it's possible some people with more specific domain knowledge might offer some insight.
- cubefox 3y agoI think the author suggests that chemical-psychological research is quite inefficient, given that so many discoveries were random discoveries rather than products of systematic search and invention.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThe point is that chemists are tasting a lot of the novel stuff they synthesize, if it doesn't look like it's going to cause instant cancer, even they they aren't supposed to. Watching NileRed regularly, it does not at all surprise me.
- WhatsTheBigIdea 3y agoWhat a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high! I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance? Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?
- vacuity 3y agoConsidering how we all seem to be the product of millions of years of hit-or-miss natural selection, it feels almost natural that our advancements have also had a great deal of luck/improbability.
- hinkley 3y agoSome homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic. But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.
- sudosysgen 3y agoAnimals do eat fermented food, through fallen/rotting fruits, so perhaps the thymol sensitivity predates hominids.
- thfuran 3y agoYeah, the ability to detect toxins likely to appear in the food supply seems evolutionarily important.
- kfarr 3y agoYeah exactly this is not just random, it’s “guided search” as commented by a sibling
- 3y ago
- elevatedastalt 3y agoI think it feels serendipitous only if you think of "sweet" taste (or for that matter any taste) as occurring in this giant continuum of tastes where hitting a specific spot on that continuum is probabilistically impossible. Ultimately, we experience tastes thanks to chemical receptors on the tongue, and as long as a substance triggers those receptors we experience a certain taste. Now of course if triggering needs a very very specific combination of atoms, then it is not very probable, but we know especially from drug research that you can use similarities in molecular structure or sometimes in say the electron cloud of the molecule to perform this triggering. Caffeine for eg is a selective adenosine antagonist that fools the body and binds to adenosine receptors. Now of course int the case of caffeine the structures are somewhat similar, but you could imagine similar stuff happening with other molecules too If you think of it as that sort of problem, it's not that surprising that many different types of molecules might achieve the same effect.
- hinkley 3y agoThat artificial sweetener they mention halfway through, the one that gorillas are evolving not to taste, man that amused me when I first heard about it a few years ago. Chalk one up for hominidae.
- BurningFrog 3y ago> * it's not that surprising that many different types of molecules might achieve the same effect* But the point of the post is that only five molecules found by dumb luck have had a useful sweetening effect.
- pjs_ 3y agoOne interesting thing in this context is that you can taste the difference between water and heavy water, even though they look the same as ball-and-sticks. Also heavy water is said to taste sweet
- amelius 3y agoUnfortunately, the chemists merely tasted, not ingested. Otherwise they would have known that their newly found artificial sweeteners cause nasty bowel issues.
- ysofunny 3y agoor you know, consider how many people have gotten into chemistry because they wanna learn how to cook, or simply to cook better. but please don't ask about what exactly they're cooking too much, keep the discussion on the how they are cooking it hahahha
- perfectritone 3y agoI'm left curious as to why our taste receptors are so attuned to sweetness if high sugar foods weren't historically correlated with being high in energy.
- lemax 3y agoPerhaps because the high sugar foods that occur in nature contain nutrients we don't get elsewhere and help us fight disease. These sugars are also naturally packaged in a way that makes them behave quite unlike added sugars, they don't lead to the same insulin spikes or high blood pressure, and consuming fruits like berries alongside more processed, artificially sweetened foods can even reduce the insulin spikes of those foods. https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-all-the-sugar-in-fruit/ https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-all-the-sugar-in-...
- gpsx 3y agoI have thoughts about that, but IANAN (nutritionalist). Not all energy is the same, as in fructose (in sucrose, which we sense as sweeter) versus glucose (what composes carbs, and also in sucrose), two simple sugars. Glucose goes more directly into the bloodsteam during digestion. Fructose does not go straight to the bloodstream but is processed by the liver. Although it gets into the bloodstream slower, it gets stored by the liver faster, and we use this as an energey resevoir when we are not getting energy directly thorugh digestion. So maybe we crave this somtimes when we need to rebuild our energy stores. Or at least it seems that way for me. I crave sugar/fruit sometimes, particularly after exercising. I don't generally even eat sweets/desserts, so my body apparently isn't fooled into always wanting sugar. I would guess from my experience sugar plays a specific role and I want it at a certain time and not others. Incidently, I get a headache when I eat processed sugar, but not fruit. (However, fruit will also give me a headache if I carmelize it, cooking it at a high temperature for a long time.) Anyway that is one reason I avoid sweetened foods and maybe why I don't get sucked into eating sugar all the time. And people think I am trying to be super healthy...
- paulpauper 3y agoThey are high in energy. carbs used by muscles for energy first over protein and fat
- Imnimo 3y agoAre compounds that might be seen in a clinical trial drawn from the same distribution as compounds that a lab chemist might accidentally taste? Is it weird that there's no overlap of a compound that is both very sweet and medically active?
- cubefox 3y agoThis poses the opposite question: What might we have missed? Maybe there are some reverse-accidents, some significant random discoveries that, due to their randomness, didn't happen.
- GolfPopper 3y agoThere was an SF story I read years ago where the core concept was that humanity had somehow "missed" an obvious power-source/FTL drive, which meant that the "solution" to the Drake Equation is that the galaxy is full of intelligent, star-spanning empires that are effectively stuck at a late-1800s tech level (with starships), because getting to there was easy, and doing all the complex 20th century stuff humanity has done is really hard. Hijinks and hilarity ensues when they reach earth.
- wheybags 3y agoDo you remember what it was called?
- caffeinated_me 3y agoI believe they're referring to the short story of The Road Not Taken, by Turtledove. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor... PDF of story: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
- wheybags 3y agoThanks!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ptx 3y agoIs it "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove? The Wikipedia description seems to match. (If so, ChatGPT got it on the second attempt.)
- johngossman 3y agoI recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.
- thfuran 3y agoHow do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is anesthetized?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boston_clone 3y agoI'm really just reposting one of the first few DDG links after inputting your question, but this article covers a few different plants: https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-works-plants-too-12266 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-work...
- reaperman 3y agoI don't think they measure if plants/bacterium are anesthetized, but in exposing them to things that cause anesthesia in humans, other potentially unrelated effects are noticed. Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different biologies for completely different things. They're essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a lot of variance in effect even among different instances of human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and profound. It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead" (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male lizards) or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a completely different function for it in the brain and regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother" or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant, maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and handle all the new effects rather than overloading the existing semaphore". Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy. Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.
- stcredzero 3y agoI can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”. I think that's more of a shortcoming of our method of diagramming molecules. It might be more apparent if we had 3D visualizations of the molecules and the receptors.
- GolfPopper 3y agoSucralose and aspartame are both reliable migraine triggers for me, and have been at least since my early 20s. Stevia and monkfruit are fine. The only other even semi-consistent migraine trigger for me is alcohol. I've successfully avoided migraines for years by carefully avoiding sucralose and aspartame (and drinking little to no alcohol), but even a small serving of something "sugar-free" and within a few hours I'll get a crippling migraine. In college, I spent a while testing, and the link between both sucralose and aspartame and my migraines was perfectly reliable. Alcohol in general has been harder to nail down. A single beer won't normally trigger a migraine, while sometimes a single glass of wine or small cocktail will. If I drank to excess it was hard to tell the difference between a hangover and a migraine; I wasn't that invested in social alcohol consumption, so I've mostly just been a teetotaler since college. Absinthe uniquely reliably gives me an acephalgic migraine with aura around 12 hours after drinking. Edited to add: I've just stayed away from ace-K and sugar-alcohols as a precaution. I'm past the point in my life where I have any real interest in risking crippling migraines for the sake of personal curiosity.
- nottorp 3y agoGenerally speaking, the more sugary the drink the worse the hangover. You seem to be unlucky enough to get the migraine before drinking enough for a hangover, but the mechanism may be the same?
- scotty79 3y agoI think I've read somewhere that drop in blood glucose can cause headaches. Maybe sweetners trick your body into releasing a lot of insuline to deal with "sugar" but there's no new sugar in your blood so glucose level drops giving you a headache? Just a theory but you could test it by monitoring glucose after ingesting something with sweetner. According to this theory ingesting sweetner together with sugar should cause you less or no discomfort. Maybe you could try doing something like drinking normal Coke after accidentally ingesting sweetner to see if it helps? Alcohol might be a different issue. After all it's just a straight up poison that metabolizes into another poison.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
- kirse 3y agoI think this is because all newly-discovered knowledge inherently reflects the miracle of new life. The point at which an "unknown-unknown" piece of information is birthed into our awareness and becomes a known fact is always going to be a fascinating and surprising story. The excitement of informational peek-a-boo, the pulling back of the universal curtains on a discovery we never expected - we might be a little older, but the reaction never changes. Entrepreneurs call it their business pivot, chemists call it serendipity.
- joneholland 3y agoThis “I did my own research” pseudoscience has no reason to be on hackernews.
- mcherm 3y agoReally? Because I think Hacker News often features posts by hackers and amateurs trying to tackle something normally handled by professionals. The comments would be a great place to reply with references to the ACTUAL research on how often chemists taste the chemicals they are working with.
- nottorp 3y agoMaybe we should ask Derek Lowe :)
- Damogran6 3y agoLoctite Blue may or may not taste sweet. I'm not reproducing the experiment.
- phkahler 3y agoThe amino acid Glycine is sweet and it's good for you. Not really patentable though.
- eduction 3y agoI’m sure this is fascinating but sometimes I wish people would put the bottom line at the top of super long posts like this. It would be nice to transmit knowledge even to people who don’t have time to follow along on your multi thousand word voyage.
- directevolve 3y agoAce-K was developed by rational investigation of sucrose derivatives, undermining it as an example of 'serendipity'. I looked at some of the sources linked on Wikipedia for the other anecdotes. Ace-K: Newton, D. E. (2007). Food Chemistry (New Chemistry). Available on libgen. Also describes the other serendipitous discovery stories, but with no citation or evidence. For Ace-K, there are conflicting accounts of whether the chemist was licking his fingers to pick up a piece of paper or rubbing out a white spot on his sweater or shirt. Sucralose: Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes. Available on libgen. Also describes the same anecdotes for other drugs. The only supporting evidence for any of them is is a direct quote from James Schlatter on the discovery of aspartame: "I was heating the aspartame in a flask with methanol when the mixture bumped [boiled abruptly] onto the outside of the flask. As a result some of the powder got onto my fingers. At a slightly later stage, when licking my fingers to pick up a piece of paper, I noticed a very strong, sweet taste. Initially, I thought that I must have had some sugar on my hands from earlier in the day. However, I quickly realised this could not be so, since I had washed my hands in the meantime. I therefore traced the powder on my hands back to the container into which I had placed the crystallised aspartylphenylalanine methyl ester. I felt that this dipeptide ester was not likely to be toxic and I therefore tasted a little of it and found that it was the substance which I had previously tasted on my finger." The book chalks up the 'test'/'taste' mixup with Ace-K to a language barrier (Phadnis's first name was Shashikant). Processed Foods and the Consumer claims that Schlatter licked his finger to 'provide friction before reaching for a thin piece of laboratory equipment.' The story about the discovery of saccharin is from The 100 Most Important Chemical Compounds: A Reference Guide, which also does not cite a source for the story. An American Chemical Society Molecule of the Week article also reports the "tasting his hand after dinner" story for the discovery of saccharin, but notes that "in another version of the story" he tasted it on his cigarette, just like in the cyclamate discovery story. Of course, the NY Times obit for Sveda, discoverer of cyclamates, is that "he brushed his lips without having washed his hands and found that his fingers tasted sweet," rather than that he put his cigarette into the chemical.
- ShamelessC 3y ago> Ace-K was developed by rational investigation of sucrose derivatives, undermining it as an example of 'serendipity'. This sort of criticism would imply that an author on LessWrong _wasn't_ a polyglot genius uniquely capable of seeing what others missed. I don't buy it. /s
- Guvante 3y agoI will note that while 20,000 chemical compounds sounds like a lot I don't know that is true. Aren't there hundreds of compounds in an orange? I do agree with the conclusion though, we likely have tasted (or could have tasted) weaker options over the years. I wonder if the real conclusion is "we don't understand the human body enough to predict what will work so getting lucky is our only option".
- treyfitty 3y agoIs it just me, or is this article way too contrived and all over the place? I grok'd the article because of its high engagement in HN, but I just could not find the point of this article, nor the value of it. I am asking this question genuinely because I have been told that I am unable to "read between the lines" and that I am considered "transactional" in nature where I need things spelled out for me. I don't necessarily agree with this assessment... could it be that I'm not capable of extracting the content "between the lines?"