How does nitroglycerin stop heart attacks?
People nowadays are such wimps. If you’re looking for strong medicine, how can you do better than a high explosive? The nitroglycerin in the pills, patches, and sprays that heart patients use for angina (chest pain) is in fact the same stuff you find in dynamite–the residue the drug leaves on patients’ skin and clothing is often enough to set off airport bomb-sniffing machines. The medicinal dose is tiny and diluted with inert material, so it’s completely nonexplosive; even so, nitroglycerin is one medicine I’d hesitate to shake before use. I’m kidding, of course. Still, straight nitroglycerin (an oily yellow liquid) isn’t something you’d want to take a swig of–even if we ignore the fact that it’s poisonous, the merest jolt will detonate it. The man who discovered it in 1846, Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, had his face scarred by a laboratory explosion. The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, made his pile after figuring out in the 1860s that mixing nitro with diatomaceous
