Fun with Chemistry

How an HIV Miracle Drug Vanished
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I know a tiny bit about chemistry, but it always struct me as little bit like black magic - wave your hands like this, recite this incantation, dump some of this mystery compound in the pot and presto, it changes color, blows up, or best of all, begins spewing poison gas. Seems to me like you need a ton of knowledge to do anything useful, unlike mechanics where all you need is a couple of hand tools and you can build a house.

The YouTube blurb:

In 1998, a pharmaceutical company suddenly lost the ability to make their lifesaving HIV drug at one of its production facilities. Then that failure spread to the company’s analysis labs. Then it spread to the other production facility, and within months the lifesaving drug had effectively vanished from the entire planet.  And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. How does a chemical just… disappear?