cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12917886
Image: 4 panels organized in a rectangle following a sequential order like a comic strip. The first panel is of a man with a very serious face stating, "Hey man, got any diphenhydramine?" The second panel is a grainy picture of the actor Tony Stark with a slightly inquisitive face and saying, "What's that?" The third panel is an identical copy of the first image and saying, "Benadryl the allergy medicine." The fourth and final panel is a grainy picture of Tony Stark rolling his eyes and taking a deep breath.
This meme is based off of a real life experience. I knew a guy that was taking NyQuil to go to sleep. I told him he'd save a lot of money and his liver if he just bought diphenhydramine since that's the substance in NyQuil that's making him drowsy. He said. "What's that?" I obviously responded, "Benadryl the allergy medicine," and he seriously sighed and rolled his eyes at me. He was so sick of my crap ๐
Edit: Yay!! I'm so happy people like a meme I created ๐
I have this problem with organic chemistry more broadly. On the one hand, I understand that rattling off the IUPAC name of a compound is much less concise and harder to get right than just saying the brand name or chemical name (which, for pharma, is often just as bullshit of a name as the brand name). On the other, you come across names like the Eschenmoser-Claisen rearrangement vs the Johnson-Claisen rearrangement, or the Suzuki vs Stille vs Negishi vs Kumada vs Hiyama/Denmark vs Sonogashira* cross couplings. Each set consists of fundamentally the same reaction with slight variations in the specific reagents. Just saying e.g. "organozinc" instead of "Negishi" would be so much more descriptive. The authors' names often aren't even that helpful in an attributive sense. For instance, some of the cross couplings were actually first reported by someone else in that list (though IIRC everyone got at least one), and most of the chemists published work on at least one of the other reactions at some point.
* Okay fine Sonogashiras are a little different what with the copper co-catalyst, but still, same mech at Pd.