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.
I enjoyed looking through the Nature Indexes section recently in that journal – I believe that they do this primarily as a way to make a new section in which to sell advertisements, to be honest, but the content itself is worth a look. They’re tracking publications in 82 leading scientific journals and looking for… Read More
One of my basic principles is that “Just because you can mess things up by going in one direction doesn’t mean that you can’t mess them up by doing the opposite”. And we may be proving that one again, with this example being the position of Chinese researchers in the US. I will stipulate up… Read More
This unusual article recently appeared in Nature: a team funded by Google (and involving researchers from a number of very well-respected research institutions) has spent some substantial effort revisiting the various reports of “cold fusion” (commentary pieces here and here). That might seem like an odd way to spend one’s money a… Read More
Possible intervention targets for age-related degeneration are always welcome, particularly when they come bearing experimental evidence, and even more so when they relate to the central nervous system. That’s the case with this new paper, from a multicenter team led out of Stanford. Interestingly, this also ties in with the well-publicized … Read More
Here’s a fascinating paper (PDF) that’s not exactly chemistry-related (well, not directly) but definitely has some relevance to a person’s everyday work life in the sciences. The authors are using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire, administered every three years in OECD countries to te… Read More
I had a book review recently in Nature, on a new volume (Thrifty Science) that looks over the history of early scientific experimentation from the viewpoint of its frugal nature – the idea of reusing and repurposing equipment, objects, and even rooms in one’s house. There was indeed a lot of this sort of thing… Read More
I’ve written here about what I referred to as “nationalist science”, in that case actions by the Hungarian government against its own universities and the Chinese government’s vigorous promotion of traditional medicine. Now we can (unfortunately) add another one to the list. The Hindu nationalist movement in India has been m… Read More
I have some blogging topics queued up (as is generally the case) but I can’t resist this one, which showed up in my Twitter feed this morning. It’s an update from Rupert Pennant-Rea in the UK – former editor of The Economist, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, and many other positions besides. Read More
Any article titled “How to Engineer Biology” is going to get a look from me – and when I’m referenced in the opening paragraphs, especially so. This is a piece by Vijay Pande in Scientific American, and I get called out for my naming of the “Andy Grove Fallacy” (found in this post and the… Read More
A correspondent sent along this item, celebrating the inventor of something that’s so ubiquitous in molecular biology and protein chemistry that you have to think for a moment to realize that it had an inventor: the ribbon diagram. That’s Jane Richardson of Duke, who started there in 1969, back when there were only about 20… Read More
