The Professor on Viagra - Periodic Table of Videos

so I got a parcel this morning I think I know what's in it but I'm not sure and I'm quite excited so let's open it it is from my friend Peter who is a green chemist this is sildenafil citrate compound which probably most people haven't heard of but it's the active ingredient of the pharmaceutical product that is called viagra like many pharmaceutical products this is a salt it's a salt of citric acid citric acid is quite a common acid you find them in citrus fruits oranges lemons so on so here there's seventeen point nine eight grams so this is more than enough to make over 300 standard tablets of Viagra now I'm not going to open it because after that none of my male colleagues would want to come into my office might not want to go into it myself because viagra is a very potent drug and it's a potent drug which causes blood vessels to distend that is to expand so blood flows around the body much more easily one of its uses is for treating so called pulmonary hypertension so the blood is not flowing into your lungs properly but if you take viagra it descends the blood vessels and so it's easier for the heart to pump the blood through the blood vessels it also effects other parts of the body like many blockbuster drugs when it was discovered and developed people didn't realize all the things that could do they knew that it would distend blood vessels but it was only when they were testing it and saw the effect on male rats that they realized that they were onto something quite exciting you can see the compounds white if you've seen pictures of Viagra tablets they're blue if you cut one in half and I haven't done then you would find that the blue is just a coating on the outside inside it's just white a mixture of this compound with some inert filler so that the tablet is a reasonable size so you can swallow it easily like many organic compounds that are complicated it has a name that is so long so I read it out because I'll never remember it otherwise it's one for a tox III six seven-day hydro one methyl you follow me seven oXXO three profile 1h Perez low for 3d that means it's right-handed pyrimidine five aisle female cell phone aisle four methyl para scene citrate when viagra was first made for each ten gram sample that's about half what I've got they needed to use thirteen and a half liters of solvents but then after Peter done applied the principles of green chemistry they got this down just about 60 milliliters of solvents and that's a huge reduction in the amount of solvent and they not only reduced the volume the solvents they used were environmentally much more friendly so thanks to my colleague Chris and the one does a video I now got a model of the molecule and you can see there's a sulfur atom here which is yellow the red ones here and here and here are oxygen atoms and the blue ones are nitrogen atoms the others are carbon and the or hydrogen and you can see the benzene ring here and another six membered ring here and it looks quite complicated chemists have designed this so that it will fit into a particular place on the enzyme that they're trying to stop operating in the body there is an enzyme called phosphodiester raise which is known in the trade as pde5 what happens if pde5 causes the blood vessels to contract and obviously it is quite embarrassing if at the wrong moment your blood vessels suddenly contract when you'd really like them to relax and so what viagra does is that it fits into the active place on the enzyme the so called active site and blocks it so the molecule can't work and this is why chemists have designed this molecule so the various nitrogen and atoms and just the right place so that they can bond on to the hydrogen's or whatever in the active sites of the enzyme so it just doesn't work and your blood vessels stay really dilated till you're ready for them to go down

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 475,692

Rating: 4.9549794 out of 5

Keywords: Sildenafil, citrate, viagra

Id: 78jg5DUbNZ0

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/humandiscoball]

Really cool... for a video that doesn't use the words penis and erection when talking about Viagra.

[u/[deleted]]

He even used it to make a Shampoo

[u/killuglypop]

For your health!

[u/splicendice]

Could that guy have any more icons on his computer desktop?

[u/kieranmullen]

I can relate to his plain desktop with 100 icons. Edit:By the end of the video his email opened.... ohhh exciting!

[u/Colonel-Rosa]

That guy had a fight with a fuse box.

Didn't he do another video on the world cup football too?

[u/ardenr]

Professor, what's another word for pirate treasure?

[u/shoehornhands]

Does he know how to make anti-viagra for those of us who can't seem to get it down?

[u/socialite-buttons]

That guy be crazy man