Ever seen supercooled water suddenly freeze?
That same kind of chain reaction once wrecked a miracle HIV drug.
Science story time 🧪👇
In the late ’90s, a gel version of Ritonavir—a life-saving HIV medication—spontaneously converted into a more stable crystal form.
It became a paste full of tiny solid shards. (Ostwald’s Rule, if you're curious.)
The problem?
The new form didn’t dissolve in water—so it couldn’t be absorbed in the bloodstream.
The drug simply stopped working.
Even weirder: after U.S. scientists visited a still-uncontaminated manufacturing plant in Italy...
The same transformation occurred there too.
What?! How?!
It's likely a submicroscopic "seed" of the new crystal structure—possibly carried on their clothing.
Like a small disturbance to the bottle of supercooled water spontaneously creating a block of ice.
The drug was pulled. Hundreds of millions were lost.
Eventually, scientists reformulated it.
But it took years—all because of a crystal form that nobody saw coming.
Science is full of ghost stories like this.
This is just one in a series of posts exploring the space where often seemingly small factors or chain reactions led to significant, sometimes catastrophic, consequences.