3/26/2012 - Synthesis of Arsphenamine

     At this point in time, in 1909, medicine was very limited on what cured versus what merely treating a disease, and there were many breakthroughs in this field all of the time.  A year prior to this date a man named Paul Ehrlich invented the chemotherapy method in fighting cancer through using toxic compounds.  With his knowledge of toxic material he was experimenting on what other diseases could be helped through this method and he synthesized a molecule called Arsphenamine, or also known as Salvarsan, used to treat syphilis.  It was found through synthesizing hundreds of organic arsenical compounds and testing each one.  This was also the first organic antisyphilic, meaning that before this compound was produced, syphilis was only treated with inorganic compounds such as Mercury.

2/11/2012 - Studies of Alkarsine Derivatives

   Then in 1840 Robert Bunsen continued the studies of the arsenic compounds synthesised in Paris a century earlier (cacodyl compounds).  He used these compounds to synthesize a numbed of derivatives of R₂As-AsR₂ into molecules (CH₃)₂AsCN.  After the synthesis Bunsen supposedly tasted this dangerous concoction, and luckily he lived to tell the tale.

 


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2/9/2012 - Cacidyl oxide synthesis

     As an apology for my absence my next couple of reactions will follow along the chronological order for the history of organometallic chemistry.  The first ever synthesis of an organometallic occured in Paris, in 1760, at a military pharmacy, where there was a cadet who was working in creating synthetic inks containing cobalt salts, and in extracting the cobalt from the raw form arsenic was removed.  In this removal the As₂O₂ is combined with CH3COOK to produce a fuming liquid containing the organometallic product of [(CH₃)₂As]₂O (also known as Cacidyl oxide)