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.
Well, as a chemist – one who does amateur astronomy on the side, yet – it’s obligatory that I write about the phosphine on Venus paper that came out yesterday. This one’s embargo was spectacularly leaky, so everyone who’s really into this stuff had various kinds of advance warning, but the news certainly has made… Read More
OK, today’s blog post is going to be even weirder than usual – we’re going to wander off into quantum mechanics. And into a particular borderland of it where have been a lot of interesting hypotheses and speculations, but plenty of hand-waving hoo-hah, so it’s important to realize the risks up front. But here we go. Read More
There’s no way, as a chemist and telescope owner, that I could let this story go by. A new paper reports mass spec data from ice grains that have been sprayed from Saturn’s moon Enceladeus, and let’s just say that there’s a lot of stuff in them. Enceladeus and Europa (a broadly similar moon around… Read More
We’re going far afield for chemistry news this morning: all the way to Mars. As many readers will have seen, there’s some very interesting (and long-awaited) news – deposits of organic compounds have been conclusively identified. (Here’s the paper, free full text). This really is of great importance, for several reasons, and… Read More
I wrote here a few years ago about the Mysterious Sparteine Shortage, and it’s a problem that hasn’t gone away. Sparteine, for those who collect neither alkaloids nor asymmetric organic chemistry routes, is a naturally occurring compound (found in a South American species of lupine, among other places), and it’s also an interestin… Read More
It’s probably not surprising, but you would be hard pressed to find an area that’s full of more intractable arguments than origin-of-life studies. There are so many theories, because it’s relatively easy to add new ones, and it’s difficult to impossible to put many of them to the real test. Meanwhile, the scientific stakes a… Read More
Did it have to be this way? I mean all of it – biochemistry, the molecules of life. More specifically, as proteins evolve and change, how many paths could they have taken that would have taken them to the same sorts of function? That’s a pretty hard question to answer, since we’re looking at a… Read More
Here’s a paper that probably doesn’t have much relevance out here in the real world, but illustrates some of the problems that we do face. Everyone remembers the Miller-Urey experiment, where a mixture of “primordial” gases (water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen) was subjected to repeated electric sparks and heat in a closed ve… Read More
I’ve been meaning to say something about these chemistry results from the ongoing Rosetta comet mission, and my plans to attend this astronomy get-together this weekend have brought them to mind again. (Here are the papers from the Rosetta team themselves). Note the variety of small organic molecules that this (ordinary) comet contains, and c… Read More
You may have seen stories about this paper, which shows that the protoplanetary disk around a (very) young star system is full of HCN, acetonitrile, and other CN-containing compounds. Studies of comets in our own system suggest that these were common materials in our early solar nebula, and this observation strongly suggests that our own… Read More
