Ever taken a bite of something, like broccoli or kale, and thought: "Whoa that's bitter!"?
Multiply that feeling many, many times over and you've got denatonium, the most bitter compound we know of.
And it was discovered totally by accident.
Back in 1958, researchers at a Scottish pharmaceutical company were experimenting with the anesthetic lidocaine.
You may have heard of it, it's often in those gels that you can use to help cool the pain of a sunburn.
And it's frequently used by doctors and dentists because a quick injection of the stuff makes a small area of the body wonderfully numb.
That's because it stops up the channels in neurons that allow sodium ions to flow in and out.
When these sodium channels can't open and close properly, the neurons aren't able to send pain signals to your brain.
And that's great, because no one needs to feel what's going on when their wisdom teeth are being removed.
Since lidocaine is incredibly useful, the drug researchers were trying to see if they could find something similar that worked even better.
