Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
It’s a good time to give a brief update about the experiments that I’m running at work. (The last time I spoke about them was here.) For those who haven’t seen one of these posts, I’ve been chasing an odd idea for months now, on and off. So far, the tests that I’ve put it… Read More
This week I should be getting the results from a crucial experiment I set up recently. Actually, the experiment is a whole set of them, a good thirty-two of the little things, and the whole lot has been in a freezer for about ten days now. But they’re soon to be thawed out and examined. Read More
Last summer I was working on an interesting chemistry idea. I posted about it on and off, in what was likely an irritating fashion – irritating because I could never quite go into just what the idea was. There were two reasons behind that: for one, my employer gets the rights to chemistry ideas that… Read More
The research idea I’ve been alluding to recently gets a key test today. I’ve got two values for one of the variables (high and low, essentially) and four values for another. And I’ve thought up two control experiments for each of those eight cases, which narrows things down quite a bit: under this experimental protocol… Read More
. . .not for the first time either, and doubtless not for the last. For anyone stopping by to get an update on my experiment, well, not very much happened. The controls all worked about like I figured they would, but the real experimental cases refused to do anything. And the one run that perhaps… Read More
Another line in one of the aforementioned Paul Orwin posts rang true for me. He was discussing some new ideas in antibacterial research, then brought himself up short as he got close to his own work: “In the highly competitive world of academic science, even a weblog is no place to divulge current research tidbits” Read More
Another line in one of the aforementioned Paul Orwin posts rang true for me. He was discussing some new ideas in antibacterial research, then brought himself up short as he got close to his own work: “In the highly competitive world of academic science, even a weblog is no place to divulge current research tidbits” Read More
For the six or eight of you who might be wondering, the experiments that I’ve been talking about on and off for a few months now are back on again. (To catch up newer readers, I’ve been irritating folks with breathless references to an idea I’ve had, that I can’t detail for proprietary reasons. It… Read More
I’m still working on the research idea I’ve been talking about. New data from some of my colleagues is helping out quite a bit, but it means changing the experimental design quite a bit, too. Beats flying blind, though, I have to say. Things have moved from the blast-of-inspiration stage to the get-this-thing-to-work stage. That’s… Read More
No earthshattering news from the meeting (not, as you could tell from my last post, that I necessarily expected any.) I did make good use of some of the time, though, by taking a stack of scientific literature with me and (for once) actually reading most of it. Like most researchers, too often I equate… Read More
