A multitude of molecules.

COLUMN: In our opinion; editorial footnote

The world now knows of 50 million compounds - and counting.

Chemical Abstracts Service, which keeps an Ohio-based database of chemical compounds, noted on Sept. 8 that the 50 millionth one had been logged. There was hardly time to pause for this molecular moment, though, as new compounds keep coming in at the dizzying pace of some 36,000 a day.

As reported on the US News and World Report Web site by Science News' Janet Raloff, Chemical Abstracts, a subsidiary of the American Chemical Society, has been maintaining a registry of all publicly disclosed chemicals since 1907. The registry includes the name or names of the compound, and notes about its structure, properties and history.

Members of Chem Abstracts' 1,300-person staff comb journal articles, patent filings around the world, commercial chemical supply catalogs, the Internet ... new compounds lurk in all sorts of places. Computers sift through machine-readable files on the compound hunt. Meanwhile, scientists and researchers keep discovering and designing new ones.

The 50 millionth entrant was reportedly identified in the Examples section of a thick patent document issued on Aug. 13. Its formal name is (5Z)-5-[(5-Fluoro-2-hydroxyphenyl)methylene]-2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-4(5H)-thiazolone.

Nicknamed arylmethylidene heterocycle, the formula aspires to be a neuropathic pain reducer someday. And while it's hard to bond with all 50,000,000 compounds, we do wish this one a long, productive and pronouncable pharmacological future.

The huge, cross-indexed database comes in especially handy for people in the patent field and synthetic chemists looking for commercial applications.

For the rest of us, it's just nice to know that chemistry is so incredibly boundless. And that we've already passed our general and organic chem courses - many umpteen molecules ago.