The Search for Sweet - Building a better sugar substitute by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, May 2006.  The substance in the flask seemed to have all the makings of an excellent insecticide. It was a fine crystalline powder, easy to imagine spraying over a field, and its molecules were full of chlorine atoms, like DDT. To make it, Shashikant Phadnis, a young Indian chemist at Queen Elizabeth College, in London, and his adviser, Leslie Hough, had begun by taking an eyedropper full of sulfuryl chloride -- a highly toxic chemical-- and adding it to a sugar solution, one drop at a time. In the violent reaction that followed, a wholly new compound was born: 1‘, 4, 6, 6‘- tetrachloro - 1‘, 4, 6, 6’ - tetra-deoxygalactosucrose. On that late-summer day in 1975, Phadnis was told to test the powder, but he misunderstood; he thought that he needed to taste  it. And so, using a small spatula, he put a little of it on the tip of his tongue. It was sweet --- achingly sweet. “When I reported my findings to Les, he asked if I was crazy, “ Phadnis remembers. “ How could I taste compounds without knowing anything about their toxicity?” Before long, though, Hough was so delighted with the substance that he dubbed it Serendipitose and tried putting some in his coffee. “Oh forget it, “ he said, when Phadnis reminded him that it might be toxic. “We’ll survive!” Over the next year, Hough and Phadnis worked with the British sugar company Tate & Lyle to make more than a hundred chlorinated sugars, finally settling on one that had three chlorine atoms and was about six hundred times as sweet as sugar. “It isn’t of any use as an insecticide,”  Hough told me recently. “That was tested.” But it had proved useful as a food. In its pure form, it is known as sucralose. When mixed with fillers and sold in bright-yellow sachets, it’s known as Splenda, the best-selling artificial sweetener in America.