There is a whole family of antibiotics which share the same core structure and have similar antibiotic activity but have different specificity or side-effects. This correlation of structure-activity relationship is a key concept in the function of biologically interesting compounds and their mimics.
Some sulfa drugs are still in use today.
This experiment simulates what happens in a chemical laboratory devoted to organic synthesis. You will do the first step in the synthesis this week but hold off on the last two steps until you've covered the underlying organic chemistry in the lecture course. You will observe the shocking consequences of a serial reduction in yield. Yields drop quickly for a few reactions with ordinarily good yields in which the reactant of each reaction in the sequence depends on the product from the previous step. The sequence of reactions follows.