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 get physical-organic. A big topic of research in recent years has been the properties of liquids and solids under boundary conditions. By that sweeping statement, I mean questions such as “When does a small cluster of metal atoms start to act like a small piece of bulk metal? Why is there a transition, and… Read More
One of the things that I have always liked about the sciences is that you get a behind-the-scenes look at what’s really going on in the world (which is something I emphasized in various entries in The Chemistry Book). If you’re not a biologist or chemist, one of those little-known but crucial things is how much… Read More
We humans have a huge number of different smell receptors, but some of the most famous are the ones that are sensitive to thiols. We don’t miss out on many low oxidation state sulfur compounds: S-alkyl and SH groups reek to the skies as far as our noses are concerned (as do the corresponding selenium… Read More
OK, this one’s a fairly easy procedure, which you will find way back in Volume 6 of the ever-entertaining Inorganic Syntheses. You’ll need a tube furnace, though, and you may or may not have one of those sitting around. You’ll also need to soften up the glass tube that goes into it, enough to make… Read More
There are a lot of ways to think about the chemical reagents that we have stirring around in our flasks. But one of the basic ones, and one of the most useful, divides them into classes according to whether they’re in solution or not. When things are in solution, they may act funny, but at… Read More
I’ve neglected to note the death of Neil Bartlett, famous for showing that the noble gases would in fact form chemical bonds. This work was a real triumph, since the great majority of scientific opinion at the time was that such compounds were impossible. Bartlett, though, formed a rather startling compound while working on the… Read More
I was running a copper-catalyzed coupling reaction the other day when my summer intern asked me how it worked. I showed her the mechanism that the authors of the paper had proposed, but pointed out that it was mostly hand-waving. The general features are probably more or less right: the copper iodide presumably does form… Read More
Dr. Warfield Teague is retiring this year, which makes me feel old. He was one of the professors who helped make me what I am today – in his case, partly by keeping me out of his chosen field of inorganic chemistry. It was a good move on his part; I’d surely have blown something… Read More
