Question: How can you see the different drugs in either medicine or everyday life utilities? (e.g. Water)

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 11 Mar 2014:

I can look at some medicines ( usually vaccines ) under the microscope but usually their molecules are too small to be easy subjects – I’m more likely to be asked to look at things like the microscopic capsules that they’re packaged in – when I say microscopic I mean smaller than a bacterium – proper nanotechnology.

A better tool for looking at them would be Mass spectrometry – which turns a sample into a gas and looks at all the compounds it contains by spreading them out and measuring them one molecule at a time. It’s sensitive technique that the people working on it here have a hard time keeping things clean enough and pure enough use in the lab.