Christopher Ellis explains how nitroglycerin went from Alfred Nobel's dynamite ingredient to heart medicine. Miners who handled it suffered "Monday disease"—angina headaches that vanished during the work week. The drug works by releasing nitric oxide, which widens blood vessels and stops chest pain.
Nitroglycerin, if you've heard of it, that is an angina medicine that is used to also open up the arteries. And yes, I said nitroglycerin as in dynamite. So Alfred Nobel back in the 1800s figured out that if you mix nitroglycerin with rock, you get dynamite. And there's kind of this like fascinating story. I can't remember all the details, but there was something called Monday disease amongst miners. So they would get these headaches when they returned to the factory on Monday mornings, like pretty reliably, and they would get this flushing. All right. And on the weekends, these miners were getting angina pectoris or chest pain. So what they figured out is that the nitroglycerin was releasing nitric oxide and being absorbed into these miners. And so by like midweek to the end of the week, their, their blood vessels are like constantly wide open. And so all their chest pain and headaches went away.
