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.
Let’s talk about some details that might sound small or even ridiculous, but (as you’ll see) they’re just the sorts of things that you have to worry about at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and physics. That makes it sound like I’m going to be going into something really high-tech here, but you be the… Read More
Let’s do some pure chemistry today, because an interesting paper has come out about a reaction that every student learns about in their sophomore organic chemistry course: the Birch reduction. It’s a powerful technique that will do some things that very few other reactions will do for you (such as break up the aromaticity of… Read More
This paper comes out and states what chemists have known for some time now: the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been changing over the years, very likely as a deliberate action on the part of the committee that awards it. It’s now more properly described as the award for “Chemistry or the Life Sciences”. That… Read More
OK, we’re going to get a bit esoteric this morning. There are all kinds of things going on in the world, but I’m going to seek refuge for a little bit in abstraction, and if that’s your sort of thing, then let’s lift off. This is broadly on the hot topic of machine learning, which… Read More
Another year! And another decade, for that matter. Before Neil DeGrasse Tyson swoops down and tells us all that these are arbitrary calendrical units, I’ll stipulate that they are, and that they’re still worthwhile opportunities to take stock. So how’s drug research going? Honestly, pretty well. We still have a lot of terrible uns… Read More
Well, this story is not specifically about the drug industry, although anything that shuts Merck down for two weeks, costs them around a billion dollars, and disrupts the US drug supply chain certainly has some relevance to it (!) I’m talking about the 2017 NotPetya ransomware attack. Merck was one of the high-profile corporate victims… Read More
Roald Hoffmann and Jean-Paul Malrieu have a three-part essay out in Angewandte Chemie on artificial intelligence and machine learning in chemistry research, and I have to say, I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would. I cast no aspersion against the authors (!) – it’s just that long thinkpieces from eminent scientists, especial… Read More
I’ve written before about the lowest tier of scientific conferences, the ones that are basically “presentation mills” for people to pad their CVs with. Now I see that South Korea is actively discouraging professors from attending such things. The Education Ministry is requiring a checklist form and vetting by each university to ma… Read More
The largest controlled isotopic tracer test that I’ve ever heard of is underway out in Arizona, in the huge “Biosphere 2” greenhouses. They’re simulating a drought in the rainforest section and comparing the carbon flux under normal and dry conditions through the use of 13C-labeled carbon dioxide. A few weeks ago the sealed… Read More
OK, let’s talk about something with pretty much no practical relevance whatsoever: the element copernicium. That’s #112, just below mercury in the periodic table, and its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of 29 seconds. Which is actually pretty impressive – that’s one of the longest-lived elements up there at those atomi… Read More
