Pretender Pills, Spurned Bedbugs, Lasers For The Lovelorn

Abstract

With Valentine’s Day nearly here, the Newscripts gang decided to cast about for tales of chemistry and romance for this week’s column. What our search yielded was more of a sidelong look at how love and chemistry occasionally mix. Take, for example, the November 2012 report “Internet-Ordered Viagra is Rarely Genuine,” in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02877.x), brought to our attention by the wags at the Annals of Improbable Research. Researchers at Pfizer—who make the famous little blue pills—decided to throw caution to the wind and see what would arrive (in the mail and presumably on their credit card bills) when they bought “Viagra” from 22 vendors claiming to sell the drug giant’s product. What they found, not surprisingly, is that most of what they bought was counterfeit, with 17 of the 22 samples containing only 30 to 50% of the active pharmaceutical ingredient the labels said they ...