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The realms of science and technology include many instances of accidental discoveries, cases in which inventors sought to develop one thing, but ended up creating something quite different. Wilson Greatbatch, for example, was working on building an oscillator to record heart sounds when he accidentally installed the wrong kind of resistor, a mistake that led to his creation of the implantable cardiac pacemaker. A narrative from 2006 purports that the artificial sweetener aspartame was initially produced by someone looking to develop a poison for killing ants: Although aspartame (an artificial sweetener marketed under the brand name NutraSweet) was also an accidental discovery, it was not initially developed as an ant poison. Aspartame was first synthesized during research into an anti-ulcer drug, and after its unexpected sweet taste was realized, it was developed by G.D. Searle in the late 1960s and early 1970s for use as an artificial sweetener. Other artificial sweetener products such as saccharin and cyclamates had already reached the market well before the development of aspartame, but many consumers felt saccharin had too much of a bitter aftertaste, and the U.S. banned cyclamates as a food additive in 1969 over (still disputed) links between cyclamate consumption and bladder cancer, so a potentially large market niche still existed for a product such as aspartame. (Coincidentally, saccharin was something of an accidental discovery, its super-sweet properties coming to light in 1879 after a laboratory worker spilled some of the substance on his hand.) The author of the anti-aspartame screed reproduced above appears to have taken her information about aspartame's being developed as an ant poison, and only changed to being considered non-poisonous after it was realized that a lot more money could be made on it as a sweetener directly from a satirical August 2006 article titled FDA Certifies Aspartame as Ant Poison, which states: The appearance of this article on a site called The Spoof!, along with its disclaimer that The story as represented above is written as a satire or parody. It is fictitious, should provide most readers with sufficient clues for discerning that the article is, in fact, a spoof. Unfortunately, the mistaking of parody for factual information is representative of the dubious quality of much of the anti-aspartame information to be found on the Internet. As for the claim that aspartame (regardless of its intended use) effectively kills insects such as ants, no evidence supports that assertion. Many common, non-toxic substances (such as talcum power or pepper) serve as effective deterrents to keep ants away from household areas, simply because the sprinkling of those substances significantly alters the ants' habitat by disrupting the scent trails those critters typically follow. As a test, we conducted a simple experiment by setting up three Ant Farm brand live ant habitats and stocking them with harvester ants. The ants of one habitat were fed (refined) sugar, sugar water, and products made with sugar; the ants of another habitat were fed aspartame, Diet Coke, and products made with aspartame; and the ants of a control group were fed ordinary water and the types of (natural) foods recommended by the Ant Farm manufacturers. The ants that were fed aspartame not only survived but thrived, digging as many tunnels and appearing just as active as their counterparts from the other two habitats: We also note that in 2007-08, Wizzie Brown of Texas A&M's Agrilife Extension Service conducted studies on the effectiveness of aspartame as a mound treatment for controlling of fire ants. In two different studies (one involving sprinkling aspartame onto fire ant mounds, the other involving watering aspartame into the mounds), Brown found no difference between aspartame-treated mounds and untreated control plots.
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