37 A
VOLUME 25, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 1953
4
OUT OF MORE THAN
Fine n e e d l e s , fine h a y s t a c k . . .
Why is o-Benzoic Sulfimide (Eastman 38) like 2-Aminobenzothiazole (East man 3940)? One of our senior chemists, who knows the Eastman catalog about as well as he knows his children's names and ages, got to brooding recently that given one of these compounds, even he wouldn't have been able to name the other right off as one of its nearest relatives in our list. (Both con sist of a C3NS heterocycle fused to a carbocycle.) His unease about the difficulty in picking up such relation ships among his own merchandise
pricked him to spend a good many hours at home making up a deck of cards coded for each compound, that could be shuffled in various ways. We now learn that another chem ist, who works not for us but for Rem ington Rand, has done the job by punched cards. We ourselves have encoded a fair amount of chemical data on punched cards, but this fellow has done it by the new Wiswesser notation for every Eastman Organic Chemical having a known structure. Thus electromechanical brains, such as are ensconced in many large organ izations, can fill in their idle moments by discovering all sorts of important relationships among the more than 3500 organic compounds available from a single, completely dependable source—namely, us. If you want to know more about what this man has done, or if you want to purchase our catalog in
3500
punched card form, write Remington Rand Inc., 315 Fourth Avenue, New York 10, Ν. Υ. In its conventional book form, the catalog remains free of charge. If you need a copy, write us.
know if we could make some Nl,N'Diethylsulfanilamide. We could. Thus were born Eastman 6900 and an ab stract of how to use it in the assay of thyroxine. The former costs a dollar a gram and the latter is free.
Sulfa for t h y r o x i n e . . . Other p e o p l e ' s b u s i n e s s . . .
NH2
S02N(CH2CH3)2 There's a curious relationship—of no physiological significance, we're sure —that links the sulfa drugs with thy roxine: several of the former, diazotized, make good colorimetric re agents for the latter. This was discov ered in 1947 by some folks in Mel bourne, Australia, who felt the need of an alternative chemical assay for the tetraiodo amino acid that is the active principle of the thyroid gland. They tried a large number of amines, looking for one which could be easily diazotized, produced a strongly col ored product when reacted with thy roxine, and was readily soluble in n-butanol. From the favorable be havior of the sulfa drugs in the trials, they took a lead and finally fixed on Nl,Nl-Diethylsu!fanilamide. They wrote a good, comprehensive paper on this work and published it in The Biochemical Journal, (42, 475(1948)). There, for all we knew of it, it lan guished until a call came the other day from the Montreal office of one of our distributors. We have a large number of such distributors scattered from Atlanta to Zurich. They are very helpful to people who prefer, at no extra cost, to do their business with a human face rather than with a squiggle at the bottom of a letter or a squawk from a telephone. In this case the man in Montreal had a friend who wanted to
Without previous experience in the manufacture of m-cresoxyacetic acid, we accepted an order for several kilos of the compound the other day. This is not exceptional. The generalized nature of our synthetic operations often permits us to make chemicals in larger-than-laboratory quantities more efficiently than our customers can do it for themselves. Accustomed as we are in these cases to keep our nose out of other people's business, we didn't ask any questions. Never theless, we did note that a team from a university in South India had bro ken into print not long ago with the tidings that m-cresoxyacetic acid makes an excellent reagent for sepa rating thorium from the rare earths of the local monazite sands and from uranium. Impressed, we called the compound m-Toloxyacetic Acid m ac cordance with Chemical Abstracts no menclature and added it as Eastman 6883 to our list. By writing to us, you can obtain any or all of the following : 1 ) a frank appraisal of our readiness to supply larger-than-laboratory quantities of any organic compound you require; 2) an abstract of the procedure for thorium; 3) 10 grams of m-Toloxyacetic Acid for $3.50 to carry it out with; 4) an explanation of the system by which we renamed it as we did. In our List No. 38, you will find more than 3500 other Eastman Organic Chemicals. If you haven't a copy, write to Distillation Products Indus tries, Eastman Organic Chemicals Department, Rochester 3, Ν. Υ. Price quoted is subject to change without notice.
DPi
Eastman Organic Also...vitamins
Distillation Products Industries
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Chemicals
Ε in b u l k . . . d i s t i l l e d
is a division
of
monoglycerides
Eastman Kodak Company
