Those Wacky Californians

[brynndragon]

I just wanted to share this, from lab_gripes:



The one on the left is the login for the UCSD chem department mail server, the one on the right is the chemical structure of Ecstasy. Coincidence? I think not! :)

Comments

[motomuffin.livejournal.com]

But the login is a trans isomer and the molecule on the right is a cis isomer... doesn't that make them at least a little bit different? You know, enough for plausible deniability? ;)

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

But the one on the UCSD logo is backwards! Doesn't that mean it would make you sad, instead?

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Rather than worry about orientation (and you're right, it should be free to rotate about that bond), I'm more interested in the excess circles on the "tail." If each one indicates an oxygen, then it's a different molecule altogether.

[null4096.livejournal.com]

In favor of it being Ecstasy:
It's a 'naughty' chemical, consistent with graduate students' sense of humor.
It doesn't look like cocaine, heroin, or marijuana (all of which have considerably more complicated ring structures).
It's unlikely the circles represent only oxygen. You've got what appears to be two oxygens attached to each other in that case, which is not a formula for stability; that's what appears to be a peroxyacid, (two bonds from carbon to O, one to the pair of O's, one to the rest of the molecule) which is usually used as an oxidizing agent.

Against:
Even if the circles didn't necessarily represent O, they seem to be using at least two of them to represent methyl groups, which doesn't make much sense.

But, guess what? PubChem has a structure search, and if you plug in that molecule with the circles standing in for O's, you get no hits! (I tried making the real Ecstasy on the structure browser and plugged it in; yup, it turns up Ecstasy.)

Personally I think it is Ecstasy and they switched a few of the atoms around so nobody could accuse them of promoting drugs on a university website.

For the record, it is metabolized by (among other enzymes) cytochrome CYP2D6. I hope you can come up with a gaming joke out of this.

[127fascination.livejournal.com]

I friended you, if thats OK. Loved your comment in NFP about pattern recognition. Glad to see another scientist with similar interests :)