Scientific discoveries are often made by chance. Substances that produce sweetness, such as saccharin, sucralose, and cyclamate, were accidentally discovered by mistake by scientists. Getty Image Bank
Scientific discoveries are often made by chance. There are cases where cleanliness, an essential virtue of research, is not observed or new substances are unintentionally discovered due to misunderstandings in communication.
Saccharin is a substance discovered in 1879 by Johns Hopkins University professor Ira Lemsen and his student Konstantin Fahlberg. Fahlberg, who was a graduate student, thought the bread was poisonous that day while having dinner after returning home from research. He soon realized that everything he touched tasted sweet.
He was working on a completely different chemical reaction, and accidentally made saccharin that was left on his hand. Saccharin, which is 300 times sweeter than sugar, was discovered because Fahlberg did not wash his hands before eating.
Saccharin has been used as a sweetener for a long time since then, but in 1977, when a study was published in Canada that rats administered with saccharin developed bladder cancer, controversy arose. For the next 20 years, saccharin has been at the center of controversy over its safety, but follow-up studies prove that it was administered at an excessively high concentration and that it does not cause bladder cancer in humans, and it is being used as a food additive again.
Sucralose is widely sold in North America under the name ‘Splenda’. Courtesy of Splenda
Sucralose, a substance that tastes sweet like saccharin, was also discovered by chance. Sucralose is a substance that has a sweet taste but does not break down in the body and has no calories. It is mainly used in diet foods and is widely sold in North America under the name of ‘splenda’.
In 1976, Shashikant Padnis, a researcher at Queen Elizabeth University in London, was born in India and was not good at English. He was working on a study using a sucrose solution with a sample of chlorine, but his supervisor misinterpreted the instructions to test a synthetic compound as instructions to taste.
He took a spatula to taste the compound and placed it on the tip of his tongue, feeling the painful sweetness. Interestingly, they were working on sucralose to make a toxic pesticide. Thanks to Padnis’ courageous (?) act, sucralose was born.
Cyclamate was also found in a similar case. In 1937, researcher Michael Sveda, who was conducting research on the synthesis of antipyretics at the University of Illinois, USA, realized that cigarettes tasted sweet when he bit into his mouth. He discovered cyclamate after tasting every beaker he had worked with to find the source of the sweetness. However, unlike saccharin or sucralose, cyclamate was banned by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1969 because it caused cancer in mice.