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 not easy – especially when you’re a mere chemist – to picture what’s really going on inside a cell. The sorts of pictures that most of us tend to use (two blobs to represent a ribosome, little snakey line curving out from it to represent a new protein) are helpful memory devices, but have… 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
Phillip Ball had an interesting piece recently over at Nature News, which touches on a subject that I’ve also thought about: when does metaphorical thinking help, and when does it hurt? (I’ve got a whole category on the blog on this topic, although I haven’t filled it up with as many posts as I’ve meant… Read More
Pretty much the only thing that an interested lay person has heard about ligand binding is the “lock and key” metaphor. I’m not saying that you could walk down the sidewalk getting nods of recognition with it, but if someone’s heard anything about how enzymes or receptors work (well, anything correct), that’s probably… Read More
