About this Author
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.
To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com
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Category Archives
August 15, 2008
Posted by Derek
Just wanted to let people know that yes, I'm still out here. I've returned from vacation, and am dealing with the usual catch-up on everything that's going on. That includes a flood of interesting data at work, thanks to my summer student, which is always nice to come back to!
Regular posting will resume on Monday, and we'll get back to what passes for normal around here.
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August 5, 2008
Posted by Derek
I wanted to let people know that starting tomorrow I'll be taking some vacation time. Internet access will be rather limited - I'll be checking my mail some in the evenings, but there will be no posting until the middle of next week. Science will have to march on without me for a few days!
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July 4, 2008
Posted by Derek
This, at least, I have observed in forty-five years: that there are men who search for it [truth], whatever it is, wherever it may lie, patiently, honestly, with due humility, and that there are other men who battle endlessly to put it down, even though they don't know what it is. To the first class belong the scientists, the experimenters, the men of curiosity. To the second belong politicians, bishops, professors, mullahs, tin pot messiahs, frauds and exploiters of all sorts - in brief, the men of authority. . .All I find there is a vast enmity to the free functioning of the spirit of man. There may be, for all I know, some truth there, but it is truth made into whips, rolled into bitter pills. . .
I find myself out of sympathy with such men. I shall keep on challenging them until the last galoot's ashore.
- H. L. Mencken, "Off the Grand Banks", 1925
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July 1, 2008
Posted by Derek
I know that a lot of people have been having trouble leaving comments here over the past few weeks, with plenty of "Too Many Comments" error messages coming up. I see from today's comment thread that there's a brute-force fix for this - deleting the cookie that this site leaves.
In Firefox, you can do that by going to Preferences, then Privacy, then Show Cookies. Find the "Corante.com" one and kill it - here's hoping that fixes the problem and that it doesn't show up again!
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May 12, 2008
Posted by Derek
One of the reasons I starting this blog was that many people I met were interested in my job. Very few of them had ever talked to someone who discovered new medicines for a living, and a surprising number of them (well, surprising to me) had no idea of where medicines came from in the first place.
Talking to such folks (interested, but with no particular training in science) gave me some good practice in explaining the work. It helps that the kind of work I do is actually fairly easy to explain. There are a lot of details – as with any branch of science, the closer you look, the more you see – but I haven’t run across any key concepts that can’t be communicated in plain language. (It also helps that medicinal chemistry, as it’s actually practiced, uses an embarrassingly small amount of actual mathematics).
The toughest things to deal with are the parts of the field that actually touch on physics and math. My vote for the hardest everyday phenomenon to explain at anything past a superficial level is magnetism. So that means that explaining how an NMR machine works is not trivial. At least, explaining it in a way that a listener has a chance of understanding you isn’t – a while ago, I took up the challenge to try to explain it here in lay terms, and I haven’t done it yet, for good reason.
Explaining statistical significance is doable, but going much past that (principal components, the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches) takes some real care. And, of course, when you open the hood on chemical reactivity, the mechanisms of bond-forming and bond-breaking, you quickly find yourself in physics up to your armpits. It’s easier to stipulate, openly or by assumption, that there are such thing as chemical bonds, and that some of them are stronger than others. You don’t want to start answering a question about why one group falls off your drug molecule easier than another one does, only to find yourself fifteen minutes later trying to explain the Pauli exclusion principle. Counterproductive.
But the basics of medicinal chemistry can be sketched out pretty quickly, which makes some of the more curious listeners wonder, after a while, why we aren’t better at it. The best example I can give them is to advance a quick, hand-waving explanation of, for example, how compounds get into cells. Then I point out that that explanation is unnervingly close to the best understanding we have of how compounds get into cells. The same holds for a number of other important processes, way too many of them.
And that's why drug discovery is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. We know huge numbers of things, great masses of detail that can take years to piece together. And it's not enough. Some of the most important puzzle pieces are still weirdly ill-defined, and there are probably others whose existence we haven't even realized yet. I'd be willing to bet that if you scanned the whole history of pharmaceutical discovery, you'd find people at every point thinking "You know, in any thirty years they should have all this figured out". But the years go by, and they - we - don't. Give it another thirty years, you think?
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April 20, 2008
Posted by Derek
Just wanted to let everyone know that there probably won't be a post for Monday - I'm doing some traveling, and will have irregular access to the internet. No doubt huge stories will break during the day, while I'm unable to comment on them! At any rate, we'll see if I can get something up for Tuesday. See you then!
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March 20, 2008
Posted by Derek
I see that “Kyle Finchsigmate” over at The Chem Blog is having some problems maintaining his pseudonymity at his own institution:
” I’m still befuddled why people walk up to me in the hall and talk to me about it. It’s more irritating than you can imagine. I feel like people treat me differently when they find out. . .
It has also become a liability and I’m not in the mood to juggle liabilities. Faculty and students around here have too much time on their hands to deeply contemplate the idiotic musings of a graduate student and it has handicapped me considerably. . .”
I’m not surprised. He’s given out enough details over the course of his blog for someone at his own school to figure out who he is without too much trouble, and I suspect that his distinctive habits of speech carry over into daily life as well. I enjoy some of his posts, but others (as I said about Dylan Stiles's blog) just serve to confirm for me that I am not, in fact, 25 years old.
I very briefly considered going anonymous back in 2002 when I started blogging, but realized that anyone who really wanted to would be able to do the same to me eventually. My writing isn’t as full of copulating inanimate objects as Kyle’s, but it’s also my own, and it’s also recognizable. (And if it’s not your vocabulary that’ll give you away, then it’s your opinions and your outlook).
I also figured that, one way or another, I’d like to be able to take credit for what I wrote. I lost the chance for some anonymous satire and griping by going the public route, but that’s just the sort of thing that would have caused even more trouble if (when) it was eventually traced back to me. So public disclosure it was. It’s worked out well, and I’ve never regretted it.
But I’m very glad that there were no blogging opportunities when I was a grad student. I had an awful lot to get off my chest about my grad school experience, and the opportunity to do it would have been hard to pass up. Sorrow would have been the only possible result. Actually, I’m just glad that there was no Web, period, when I was in grad school, since there’s no telling how long it would have taken me to get out of there if I’d that distraction constantly available.
So a word of warning for those of you thinking of starting a pseudonymous site: you’re heading toward a contradiction. If you’re doing so because you’re going to say things that you can’t say under your own name, you raise the chances considerably of eventually finding them there. And since the internet, for all practical purposes, Is Forever, your opinions and actions will follow you around whether you want them to or not.
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February 19, 2008
Posted by Derek
No post today - I'm taking an extra day to the long weekend, and going in with my kids to see the lizards at the Museum of Science in Boston. Just wanted to let everyone know that nothing is down, and things will be back to their usual levels tomorrow!
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February 1, 2008
Posted by Derek
As many of your have noticed, there's been some software upheaval behind the scenes here the last few days. Many comments aren't getting through at all, and the others are showing up in the system, but not on the public site. Hammers and screwdrivers are being wielded, and I hope things are fixed up soon. . .
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January 2, 2008
Posted by Derek
Just wanted everyone to know that we're back in business around here, after a holiday break and some technical problems behind the scenes. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow!
In the meantime (and for some time to come, since there's a lot of it) I can recommend this year's Edge.org question: "What have you changed your mind about?". The index page will get you started. Plenty of good essays are to be found - for example, I just read some extremely sensible stuff from Brian Eno. Enjoy!
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December 20, 2007
Posted by Derek
No real post today - too much snow shoveling, etc. Things will be a bit irregular around here during the holiday season, as usual, and I think that today will kick it off.
People have asked me how I'm liking Cambridge now that I've been up here a few months. The answer is, just fine. This Christmas season is a great improvement over last year's, that's for sure. Mind you, right now we've got between two and three feet of snow on the ground out here to the west of town, and my wife and I have taken a couple of unplanned sled rides down our steep driveway, with a Honda Accord substituting for the traditional sled.
And although I've spent the last twenty years moving to higher and higher latitudes, I have yet, it seems, made it far enough North to where traffic doesn't go to pieces when it snows. I take the train myself, which works out fine, but last Thursday people were taking hours just to get across Cambridge. (That's as opposed to a weekday morning, where those three miles only take 45 minutes - I did say I was taking the train in. . .)
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November 21, 2007
Posted by Derek
I've had several requests, so here we go. This is a slightly modified version of Craig Claiborne's recipe in the New York Times Cookbook. He was a Southerner himself, Claiborne, so he knew his pecan pie:
Melt 2 squares (2 oz.) baking chocolate with 3 tablespoons butter in a microwave or double boiler. Combine 1 cup corn syrup and 3/4 cup sugar in a saucepan and bring to boil for 2 minutes, then mix the melted chocolate and butter into it. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, beat three eggs, then slowly add the chocolate mixture to them, stirring vigorously (you don't want to scramble 'em with the hot chocolate goop).
Add one teaspoon of vanilla, and mix in about 1 1/2 cups of broken-up pecans. You can push that to nearly two cups and still get the whole mixture into a deep-dish pie shell, and I recommend going heavy on the nuts, since the pecan/goop ratio is one thing that distinguishes a home-made pie. Bake for about 45 minutes at 375, and let cool completely before you attack it. Note that this thing has an extremely high energy density - it's not shock-sensitive or anything, but make the slices fairly small.
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Posted by Derek
Well, the drug labs are emptying out today, like many other workplaces around the US. My American readers will be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow (and Friday as well, in most cases), and so will I. This will be our first since the new job and the move, and I have a turkey to thaw and a chocolate pecan pie to make. Tomorrow I'll be in charge of roasting the bird, since my wife has washed her hands of the oven in this house until we can get it replaced. I've had my incidents with it too, but I figure that if I can make 100 grams of alkynylaluminum reagent without setting anything on fire (a near thing, though, as I recall), then a sixteen-pound non-pyrophoric turkey should be no problem.
Last Thanksgiving I was doing roughly the same things, but in the knowledge that in two months I'd be out of a job. I prefer this year, hostile kitchen appliances and all. I hope that everyone reading this and celebrating the holiday has a good time at it, and for my readers outside the US, the best to all of you, too. You don't have to eat turkey to be glad for what you have (hey, in some countries serving a turkey would actually make that more difficult). I'll see everyone on Monday, at which point science will get up off the couch and start marching on again.
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November 5, 2007
Posted by Derek
I see that this blog is getting creamed in the Weblog Awards voting, which is similar to what happened last year. Pharyngula and Bad Astronomy are once again fighting it out for supremacy, this year joined by the fans of Climate Audit.
That last one not a blog I've read yet, since I regard most arguing about global warming to be as much religious as scientific. In my college years I largely lost my taste for arguing with people whose views were not susceptible to change, and too many people on both sides of that one fall into that category as far as I can see.
But the fierce arguing does lead to a lot of blog traffic, that's for sure - the same goes for a lot of the discussion on Pharyngula, as far as I can see. Disputes about sulfonamides and logP don't stir up the same passions, though, but if you're inclined, throw in a vote for this site to keep things from looking too disgraceful.
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October 9, 2007
Posted by Derek
For those of you who were taking the day off yesterday, there's a Nobel speculation post just below this one. Today, it's time for a long-overdue blogroll update. We have the In Vivo Blog to lead things off, and Away From the Bench, which I guess describes me right now, the fine line between Drugs and Poisons, industry news site Fierce Biotech, England's Peter Murray-Rust, the all-fluorous all the time F- Blog, a reluctant chemist doing Closeted Chemistry, Making Graphite Work (something I've never been able to do), the weirdly named Power of Goo, and the most aptly named Great Molecular Crapshoot.
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August 7, 2007
Posted by Derek
When I mentioned that I was moving to a company in the Boston area, I had a number of responses from readers of the site about meeting up in person. Now that I'm (sort of!) settled in, I wanted to see if there was still some interest in that idea. It's an odd thought for me, I have to say, but this is the first time I've lived in an area with enough readership density to make such an idea practical. Being recognized at several recent gatherings has brought home to me (in a way that Sitemeter can't quite manage) that a lot of people drop by here.
Lunch would probably be easiest, and I can get to most of the locations that people would think of in the Cambridge research zone. Those who are interested can leave suggestions for a venue in the comments. I've only lived here a month, so I'll defer to the people who know the area better. As for food, I'll eat most things that were once alive, so that won't be a problem on my end.
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August 3, 2007
Posted by Derek
My travel schedule has left me little time for blogging this morning, so I wanted just to report that I'll be revisiting some of the recent topics around here. My post on virtual companies led to a number of examples being sent to me - I want to look them over and report back. It's my guess that many of these deal with generic drugs or abandoned products, but we'll see. I still don't see how this model would work on a large scale (Pfizer, anyone?), but perhaps there's room for it on a smaller one.
And my post on abandoning the likes of tin, HMPA, and other nasties in med-chem research bought in quite a few counterexamples. I put a note up on that entry to direct new readers of it to the comments, so as not to miss them. I think that different companies treat these issues differently - in some shops, the med chem labs are encouraged to do whatever it takes to make the compounds, with the expectations that process chemistry will straighten out the kinks. Other companies, though, frown on that as irresponsibly throwing the problem over the wall to the next group, and want their med-chem people to forestall such problems if they can. I'll do a whole post on that subject next week, if possible, and we'll take an informal head count.
These bring up a general thought: as with any blog, this one is a reflection of my own experience and biases. (That's the whole point of a blog, eh?) I like the fact, though, that there are so many readers around the industry to confirm or disprove things as they come up. It's my hope that the non-industry audience finds the back and forth on these topics worth reading - I have a mixed crowd around here, and I try to keep things readable for anyone interested who happens by.
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June 26, 2007
Posted by Derek
Apologies to everyone for the gap in posting around here. As you probably gathered from the most recent one, things are hectic. We're preparing our house (Stately Lowe Manor, if you will) for listing on the local market - it's in good shape, but we've accumulated a lot of stuff over the last ten years, much of which won't make the move to Massachusetts. At the same time, we're visiting lists of houses up there. Things aren't dull.
So I'm going to go on hiatus for a couple of weeks while all this gets sorted out. I start at my new position then, and at that point blogging will resume. Until then, I have a question for everyone: what am I going to call the place? I'd like to be able to refer to the Wonder Drug Factory in the past tense, so I'll retire that name. Calling the new place the New Wonder Drug Factory seems cumbersome, and besides, it's only new for me.
Suggestions are welcome, and I'm very happy to be in a position to ask. I'll start things up here again in the second week of July, and see everyone then.
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June 21, 2007
Posted by Derek
No time for a new post today, unfortunately. I'm on the road, up in the unexplored (by me) territory of suburban Boston, looking at schools and houses today and tomorrow. At the moment, I'm sitting in one of those free-wireless sandwich places, catching my breath and getting ready to look at real estate.
When I was a kid, if you'd told me that I'd be living in a place that cost what these do, I'd have expected the full James-Bond-villian setup: missile launching facility, access to underground submarine base, etc. Looking at the listings, I can only assume that the fashion for these amenities has passed. Probably just as well - I'm not sure I could get the wife and kids to wear the matching jumpsuit uniforms.
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May 18, 2007
Posted by Derek
Over at Nature's Sceptical Chymist blog they have a Friday interview feature, and this week you can see them interrogate me. (The blog's name is lifted from Robert Boyle, one that I liked so much that I also wrote it on the front of one of my undergraduate lab notebooks.) Note: I had this post up for a couple of hours attributing the title to Robert Hooke instead. It was early in the morning, really.)
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May 9, 2007
Posted by Derek
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April 4, 2007
Posted by Derek
I'll be posting later on today as well, but I wanted to mention another crop of science blogs that have been added to the blogroll.
First off, I'm glad to report that there's another pharma drug discovery blogger at One in Ten Thousand. And there's The Futile Cycle, on the biology side, which includes the only poem I've ever seen written about ion channels. I've also added a new blog called Science, Theory, and Liberty, which I hope keeps going. Those air-sensitive organometallic folks now have representation of their own with Organometallic Current. And finally, there's Med Tech Sentinel, with news from the whole medical-device world, which is an area that I don't manage to cover very much. Enjoy!
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February 22, 2007
Posted by Derek
There's a whole list of posts below live-blogged from the CMPI conference that I attended on Wednesday, and I think that the organizers will be putting up some audio files of the proceedings soon. It was an enjoyable meeting, and I met a number of interesting people. Since it also involved politics (on which everyone's an expert), the discussion was often livelier than at many scientific conferences. The entry barrier for speaking up about (say) the effect of efflux transporters on toxicokinetics, fascinating subject though that is, is higher than for talking about where the FDA should get its money and how they should spend it.
While in DC, I also got a chance to meet Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle, and we had a nice talk on economics, scientific research, academia, kitchen implements and the eighteenth-century novel. (Get yourself a liberal arts education, and you'll never run out of conversational topics, is my advice). Next time I'm in the area, she threatened to get Tyler Cowen to show up, who will probably take us to some Papuan or Zanzibarean restaurant in a decrepit strip mall. (Not that he's wrong about those being reliable places for good ethnic food).
Blogging will now resume its one-a-day pace here: five per day in real time is about my limit (particularly in a room where there's no place to plug in the laptop - although the CMPI people did well by us in getting wireless access set up outside the hotel's usual exorbitant charges).
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February 19, 2007
Posted by Derek
I'm headed out tomorrow afternoon to Washington, DC, for this conference on "The Media and Medical Science", sponsored by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. They've asked me to participate on one of the panels, namely "Does Media Coverage Reflect Reality, and Does It Matter?"
Since I've no problem unburdening myself of my opinions, this should be pretty enjoyable (for me, anyway - the audience will have to take its chances). Should any readers be in the area and able to attend, I'll look forward to meeting you!
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February 16, 2007
Posted by Derek
I know that people have been having some problems leaving comments here the last few days - I've had some myself; it's rather disconcerting to find that comments you're making to your own blog are being treated like radioactive spam. But I think the issue has been resolved, so if anything else odd happens, please let me know.
If you don't blog yourself, you'd probably be amazed at the volume of comment spam that comes in. Well, if your e-mail address is out on a web page like mine, maybe you wouldn't, considering what that does to your inbox. I pull two or three hundred offers of winning lotteries, African fortunes, dubious business propositions, and outright gibberish per day into my address. But there's a nearly equal volume of comment spam, which was always seemed to me one of the most pathetic attempts at advertising I've ever seen. Why bother? Well, because it's basically free, and hey, one out of every ten million people might click by accident. . .
There are keyword and lookup filters behind the scenes here that do an excellent job of catching all this garbage. Before they were implemented, I'd come in to take a look at the site in the morning and find the last fifty comments were a repeated offer to do things with farm animals or something, which was a welcome way to start the day, naturally. But if the setting get a little too aggressive, actual comments start getting flung into the bit-bucket. Every day or so I take a look at the pile and rescue a few strays, but we'll see how things look under the current settings.
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January 29, 2007
Posted by Derek
Some may have noticed that the blogroll at left has been modernized a bit. I've tried to separate out the chemistry and drug industry sites - please let me know if yours has come down on the wrong side of the line.
And more sites have been added, as the relentless wave of chemical blogging continues to crest. Some of these sites are young, and others I just had neglected to link. Welcome to Occam's Blog, Pharma's Cutting Edge (the renamed Crownstone blog), the QDIS Blog, Curly Arrows, Thesis Sprint (which I hope can eventually get renamed once everything is done), Molecule of the Day, Hdreioplus, Levorotation, The Crimson Canary, the Chemistry World Blog from the folks who are now carrying a regular column of mine, Totally Mechanistic, The Synthetic Referee, Regulatory Affairs of the Heart, and Synthetic Environment!
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January 24, 2007
Posted by Derek
I just wanted everyone to know that things have been quiet here because of some Movable Type maintenance behind the Corante scenes. Things seem to be working now, though, and rather more zippily than before. There seem to be a number of comments that were backed up in the pipes which have now appeared, too. I have a backlog of things to talk about (Pfizer! Dichloroacetate!) and regular blogging will resume this evening or tomorrow morning. Even though I'm soon to be unemployed, the blog will live on.
Another update: my manuscript for the "Vial Thirty-Three" paper has been put on hold for a bit, because of some data in it, not related to its main point but still unremovable, that need to wait before being disclosed. A little later on this year I should be clear to publish, though. It's frustrating, but since I did this work at the company's expense, they certainly have the right to say when it gets released.
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December 26, 2006
Posted by Derek
Well, I took a load of data home with me, along with a first draft of the paper I'm working on. But as usual, my attempts to get any actual work done over the Christmas holidays have shriveled up on contact with the actual days off. I'm not sure why this always seems so plausible while I'm finishing up the last working days of the year, and so laughable three or four days later.
My two children probably have a lot to do with it. They're ready to take me on in a whole list of games, and since they know as well as anyone that these days don't run on a normal schedule, they don't see any reason for me not to be available. (And they have a point!) I find that when I'm thinking hard about a problem, and most especially when I'm writing, that I can't do it with interruptions or extraneous noise. I was better about those when I was in college, but I've lost the ability to deal with them. Or, perhaps I'm just dealing with things that require more thought.
At any rate, my brain needs room to work in, so I'm an awful conversationalist when I have to think hard about something. There's a period in the first few seconds, especially, when I'm working on formulating an answer to something, where any interruption will send the whole thing crashing down. It's hard to describe - thinking about the problem in front of me, I can start to see how this piece might fit over here, and this section seems to be matching up with this one over here, and it feels right to make an analogy to this part, which was the thing that worked when - what? What? We're out of peanuts, and have I watered the Christmas tree today, and do I feel like being pulverized at foosball?
Ah well, my manuscript can wait a few days - it's not like I'm not going to have plenty of opportunities to work on it when I get back. Meeting will not interrupt: my work calendar has attained a state of clarity that Zen rock gardens can only strive for. For now, I need to go show my eight-year-old son that foosball wasn't invented yesterday.
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December 21, 2006
Posted by Derek
Well, since it's the Christmas season around here, posting will be intermittent. I'm going to be making cookies with my two children tomorrow, for example. (I've explained to them that you should be suspicious of an organic chemist who can't cook). Further kitchen work over the next few days will include crown roast of pork, leg of lamb for a crowd (I'm hoping it's good enough weather to do it outside on a spit), and the traditional (for me!) Christmas breakfast of country ham , scrambled eggs, biscuits, and red-eye gravy.
I'll post occasionally, though, in between all this cooking, present-wrapping, and the like, but the regular schedule won't resume until after New Year's. I hope to do some work on my "Vial 33" paper while I'm home, but that may be wishful thinking. I did mention that I have two young children, after all. . .
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December 8, 2006
Posted by Derek
As that discreet logo over on the left sidebar shows, this site has been nominated for a weblog award. This is the vote-once-a-day-per-computer one, and clicking on the banner will take you to the voting page. First prize, as I understand it, is basically a hearty handshake, but if you feel inclined to help out the site's standing in the vote tally, by all means please do. I've already got several of the other finalists on the blogroll, but I encourage you to check them out as well if you're not familiar with them.
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November 14, 2006
Posted by Derek
Just a few days after I commented on the troubles that Isis Pharmaceuticals has had developing antisense DNA therapies, they've popped up with impressive clinical cardiovascular clinical data. Their latest hope, ISIS 301302, has shown some strong LDL-lowering effects, both as a single agent and in combination with statin therapy.
It's aimed at the production of a key LDL-transporting lipoprotein, apoB-100, which target the company correctly describes as "undruggable" through standard med-chem approaches. Of course, the RNA people are hot on its trail, too (these guys, for example). It's a good opportunity for these approaches, since the protein is of clear biochemical importance, and the site of its synthesis is in the liver and gut wall. Those, of course, are the first tissues that an oral drug sees, and (in the case of many antisense and RNAi attempts) the last ones, too. Going after something that lives there is a good strategy.
On a different topic, welcome more additions to the blogroll, such as Totally Medicinal, a med-chem blogger who's concentrating on the synthetic chemistry end of things. And there's Xcovery, a good kinase-o-centric site for those who can't get enough of 'em.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled site closure, already in progress. I've started a new category, "Closing Time", where my posts on that topic will go. There are a lot of odd blogworthy issues and loose ends associated with shutting down an operation like this. I'll be writing on them in the coming weeks, since many people will (fortunately) not have experienced the process firsthand.
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November 8, 2006
Posted by Derek
No post this evening, for reasons that should become very clear in the late morning (EST) on Thursday. I'll update then. . .
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Posted by Derek
As many of you have noticed, there's some Movable Type construction work going on behind the scenes over here, which seems to have knocked out the commenting function for the moment. I hope that it'll be back quickly, and that the various service interruptions will diminish.
I was up late eating Indian food and following the election, with little time to post last night. No matter which side you were cheering for, I can recommend plenty of tandoori chicken and papads. My wife's home-made basmati rice, curried cauliflower, and cucumber yogurt are not (as of yet) available online, though, so you're on your own there.
So for today, I've updated the blogroll to the left. A few inactive sites have departed, but there's more than enough new linkage to make up for them. Welcome to Omics! Omics!, from longtime reader Keith Robison, Molecule of the Day (waving the chemistry flag at Scienceblogs), the clearly obsessed Kinase Pro, and the up-to-your-elbows lab details of Org Prep Daily. And there are plenty more these days: Whistling in the Wind, The Curious Wavefunction, Carbon-Based Curiosities, the Half-Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog, Dreaming Spirals, Chemical Forums, Mining Drugs, Chemical Musings (the former Interfacial Science), Atom Pusher, She Blinded Me With Science, Transition State, Chemoblog, Culture of Chemistry, and Lamentations on Chemistry.
Man, blogging does seem to have finally reached takeoff in the chemistry world over the last few months. Enjoy!
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September 22, 2006
Posted by Derek
No time for a post for today, unfortunately - I was up late last night, trying to see this from my backyard. No dice - like most amateur astronomers, I need a darker sky. Even if I'd been able to see the galaxies, they wouldn't exactly look like that photo from Kitt Peak, though - visually in my 11-inch scope, they're going to be a lot more like the first one of this series. And as for this view: well, not without my own space program.
Coming up next week: more Ariad craziness, and we'll tackle (in a separate post!) the perplexing question of whether you have an infrared spectrometer in your nose or not.
Update: forgot to mention this. I've noticed that the comment spam filters seem to be set a bit more aggressively here these days. A number of comments are wrongly ending up in the junkpile. I'm rescuing them, but often not in a very timely manner. This weekend I'll try to tweak things back a bit.
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August 15, 2006
Posted by Derek
I'm going to be doing some traveling for the next few days, so posting will be intermittent, depending on time and internet access. E-mail, similarly, will stack up until the middle of next week - anyone with lucrative publishing offers, please wait until then to send 'em to the top of the queue. I think the drug industry will manage just fine without me. . .
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July 13, 2006
Posted by Derek
There are a lot of interesting blogs that I need to catch up with, so here we go. First off is On Pharma, which focuses on the manufacturing end of things, with a lot of good stuff about FDA approvals and the clinical world. Note this recent post on the "cGMP Priesthood", which is something I fortunately don't have to deal with.
Life of a Lab Rat is a view from the bench in Sydney (no, not the beach, the bench), and Pipette Monkeys provides one from Heidelberg. Is This Thing On? has a biotech/bioinformatic perspective, and I've been wondering when someone was finally going to invent the Eastern Blot. And finally, the group at Nobel Intent is always worth checking.
Update: And how could I forget The Chemblog?
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May 25, 2006
Posted by Derek
Things were pretty disrupted on the servers around here yesterday, and we seem to have lost a few of the most recent comments. I couldn't get on last night to put up a new post, and won't be able to until this evening (work, y'know).
For my readers with a lab right outside their door, my advice is to go set up something weird. It always helps to have something going that's off track from your regular work. Mind you, the stuff I have going on in that category is in the process of ruining my health, because we still haven't been able to analyze my control experiments. But if you pick something that doesn't depend on one critical piece of machinery, you should be fine.
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May 2, 2006
Posted by Derek
I've been out of town for the last few days, and just got back around midnight last night. So there will be no new post today - I'll have my hands full just staggering around my lab trying to figure out what's going on. The Wonder Drug Factory seems to have done just fine in my absence.
I told my lab associates that they were under orders not to discover anything while I was gone, so I could be back in time to take the credit. Motivational speeches like this are important. I can't quite reach the levels of a colleague of mine, though, who used to lean out of his office and call out "Work! Work! The harder you work, the faster I get promoted!"
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April 10, 2006
Posted by Derek
I have Schedule D to wrestle with tonight, so it's time for some linking and blogroll additions. I'll start with a relatively new blog from a pharma consultant, Eye on FDA, and that'll do it from the industrial side this time.
The rest are from academia, some pure chemistry sites such as Dylan Stiles', which I've already linked to. I enjoy his site a lot, but one thing that it tells me is something that I already knew - namely, that I'm not 25 any more. Another blogging chem grad student is Paul Bracher, at Harvard. Another site for hard-core organic chemistry fans is Totally Synthetic. I did just this sort of thing for my PhD, and it's a lot more fun to read about than it is to do. Another blog from inside academia, this time from a post-doc, is Interfacial Science. Another post-doc can be found at Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc.
I can also recommend Nature's venture into chem-blogging, the group-written Sceptical Chymist. (That's the name I put on my first notebook in my first-year Quantitative Analysis course, actually - Robert Boyle is definitely worth remembering).
And finally, there's Peter Rost, famously ex-Pfizer. You're unlikely to find very many points of agreement between his worldview and mine, but you can see for yourself here.
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March 30, 2006
Posted by Derek
Sorry about the lack of a post this morning. I took the day off from the Wonder Drug Factory to do some work here at home. Let me just say that if any of you are suffering from an excess of energy, it's nothing that going through a pound and a half of decking screws won't cure.
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March 22, 2006
Posted by Derek
Well, it was a long day at the Wonder Drug Factory - I got in early to start a large reaction, and took it through a workup and column during the rest of the day. I'm taking tomorrow off to take my kids out and around, and since people were waiting on the stuff I made today, or so I'm told, there had better be something missing from the batch when I come back. (Of course, I don't have much room to get haughty, since the reason that there's a shortage was because I made the wrong isomer of the stuff by mistake last time. Ah, how we laughed, except me.)
So rather than crank out something aggressively substandard tonight, I'll leave everyone to their own devices. A run up and down the blogroll at left should be enough to impair your productivity - I'll see everyone on Friday.
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March 2, 2006
Posted by Derek
Today's posts (on Matthias Rath and Procter and Gamble, respectively) disappeared well before noon due to a Movable Type problem back at Corante HQ. I think we should be back to normal soon, but wanted to leave this placeholder up for now. I'll leave those two up for Friday, and we'll get back on track next week. . .
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February 23, 2006
Posted by Derek
Well, I'm going to try to post tomorrow morning about the Sanofi-Aventis investors meeting, when we should (in fact, had darn well better) hear some more about the rimonabant situation. And the debate over the New England Journal of Medicine and Merck is going on briskly in the comments to yesterday's post, so please take a look over there if you haven't yet.
So tonight I'll take a few minutes to rework the blogroll. Welcome newcomers Terra Sigillata, Science, Shrimp and Grits, the Mass Spectrometry Blog, Tobias Sing's Bioinformatics Blog, Snowdeal, Cosmic Variance, On Pharma, and Oncology Updates.
And note also the new locations of Uncertain Principles, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Aetiology, Gene Expression, Pharyngula, and Respectful Insolence at Scienceblogs.
No doubt there are other sites I should be linking to - suggestions are welcome!
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January 16, 2006
Posted by Derek
In all the server-migrating of the last week, it appears that some of the recent comments have been hosed. I just wanted to let everyone know that it's unintentional - hey, I even let the comments that show up on the Intelligent Design posts around here stand. I also think I've fixed the "comment held for moderation" problem that was afflicting all of us, so if it happens again, please drop me an e-mail.
In other blog-news, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome the advent of the Scienceblogs site, which incorporates several of the blogs over there on the left-hand side of the page. I'll be updating the blogroll shortly.
There's an interview with me up over at the financial site The Stalwart. Unfortunately, I don't think I've revealed enough to make anyone rich, but do write if I turn out to be wrong about that.
Finally, via Chad Orzel's new Uncertain Principles site over there, I found this useful companion to the Edge.org "Dangerous Questions" page. As you'd figure, not all of the submissions there are of equal quality, so these guys have taken the trouble of digging out the best ones.
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January 3, 2006
Posted by Derek
Over the last month or so, the commenting system here has been rather erratic. Despite having Movable Type set to allow anyone to comment, people keep getting "held for moderation" messages - it happens to me, too. At the same time, an increasing amount of junk is making its way through. I'm going in manually every so often to clean out the stables, but that's not the best solution. My intention is to let anyone comment at any time, except the people who are robotically offering us all opportunities to play poker or to all-naturally extend various organs of our bodies. Anyone with experience in dealing with MT's current treatment of junk comments is welcome to offer suggestions on how to fix things.
I should also mention that Corante is going to be trying some server migrations, probably starting this coming weekend. The hope is that posting on this and the other blogs won't be disrupted, but if there's an outage, that'll be the reason. . .
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November 25, 2005
Posted by Derek
Well, like many of my fellow Americans, I'm taking today as the second day of Thanksgiving. The Wonder Drug Factory where I work is closed for the day, and I'm here at home with my two children while my wife braves the shopping crowds. (I'm positive that I got the better end of that deal). My hardest task will be keeping the two of them from eating the rest of the chocolate pecan pie I made, which they've already decided would be a reasonable breakfast. And no, I have no reason to complain about anything if these are the sorts of problems that occupy me: Thanksgiving, indeed.
At any rate, I can recommend a browse through the blogroll over there on the left. There are some new additions today, namely TP With Page Numbers, Aetiology, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Politics and Ethics of Science, and the fine new group blog Nature Erratum. (That last one makes me wonder why no political blogger has titled a site "The New York Times Regrets the Error"). And if you don't know the medblogger Dr. Charles, then you've got even more to read instead of doing work. I'll see everyone on Monday!
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October 19, 2005
Posted by Derek
Looking for another way to avoid doing some work for a bit? The latest Tangled Bank roundup of science-blogging is up. This weekend, I update the blogroll. There are too many good ones that I'm missing.
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October 6, 2005
Posted by Derek
For a huge festival of science-blogging, check out the latest Tangled Bank. It's getting hard to keep up with the number of worthwhile sites out there.
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September 30, 2005
Posted by Derek
I wanted to let people know that I have an opinion piece up at the Manhattan Institute's "Medical Progress Today" site, on the FDA's conflict of interest rules for their advisory panels. There are some proposed changes that I don't think will work out very well. . .
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August 14, 2005
Posted by Derek
There seem to be enough science bloggers around now that we're starting to wonder what it is that we're doing, and why. The recent article in The Scientist has started some of this, with its focus on why more scientists don't blog. Living the Scientific Life as well as Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles have weighed in, among others (and I'd like to thank both of them for the kind words they've said about this site, while I'm at it.)
GrrlScientist, in that first link, points out that the Scientist article seems to miss one of the reasons that scientists blog (or might want to): explaining just what it is that they do. That's an important point - it's a big reason why I started and a big reason why I continue. I had had several experiences over the years where people found out what I did and pumped me for all kinds of information. And it hit me that although few people had any idea about drug discovery, they tended to say "Wow, that sounds like a really neat job" once they did. (It was a big improvement from the usual response you get when you tell people that you're a professional chemist, I can tell you.)
Chad Orzel goes on to note that large numbers of people see science as something that's difficult, boring, and beyond them, so they just tune out. I'm afraid he's right. But I used to explain my experiments to the janitorial staff when I worked late at my first job, which showed me that this didn't have to be the situation. To be sure, none of my explanations started off with the phrase "Consider the Hamiltonian. . .", but none of my conversations with my colleagues start that way, either, not if I can help it.
Instead, we talk about how we're not getting good blood levels with our latest series of compounds, wonder about whether that's because they're not getting absorbed through the gut or are getting cleared from circulation too quickly, and outline some experiments that would tell us one way or another. Now, it's true that we use a lot of verbal and scientific shorthand to discuss these things - a conversation like that could go "See the screening PK yet?" "Yeah, what a rotten AUC. Do we have an i.v. tee-one-half on that stuff yet?" "No, but we could probably get a slot in the next cannulated rat run." And that wouldn't mean much to one of the Uruguayan janitors that used to ask about my work.
But with a few extra minutes to explain what we were trying to do and why, they could appreciate what was going on. And they could see that it wasn't easy, and that we often didn't know why things were happening, and that we had to wait a long time between chances to run around high-fiving each other. Considering how television and movies treat science (which, to be fair, could be the only way to treat it for the purposes of mass entertainment), knowing these things was a real step up.
So when I found out about blogging, I didn't hesitate very long before jumping in. Here was a chance to do just the kind of thing I did when talking to people one-on-one, but for as many visitors as cared to stop by. It sounded like just what I'd been waiting for, and it still is. The pharmaceutical industry has been taking a beating the last few years, some of it (not all!) deserved, and I think there's an ecological niche in the blog world for someone who can talk about it from personal experience.
The majority of my readers, as far as I can tell, are not involved in drug discovery themselves. I certainly enjoy having people from the field reading and commenting, and I try to pitch my posts to both levels at once, as much as possible. But I've never pictured my site being exclusively a peer-to-peer experience. Since I'm in the drug industry, it couldn't very well be, in any case. We drug-industry types obviously can't talk about the specifics of what we're doing, and I don't. (That's why the "Birth of an Idea" posts are so maddeningly vague, and even those don't apply to any specific drug or drug target.) There's just not much chance for blogging to help me out with any current problems in my research, because those problems are all proprietary. It can give me a broader perspective on my industry, which might come in handy, but it's going to do zilch for what's stirring in my fume hood.
(I should note that both of the posts I linked to in the first paragraph put the public-outreach issue in terms of the teaching-intelligent-design debate. More on that another day. . .)
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August 6, 2005
Posted by Derek
I've finally updated and cleaned up my blogroll over on the left - removed some inactive sites, fixed broken links, and added quite a few others. There may be some folks over there you haven't heard of, so give 'em a try.
On the home front, I'm nearly through adding all my old Lagniappe posts to the archive pages. Next up will be the earlier days of "In the Pipeline", finally categorized for your time-wasting pleasure.
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July 28, 2005
Posted by Derek
I wanted to mention that I've been gradually adding to the archives and category pages over there on the right-hand side of the page. My original blog, Lagniappe, has been difficult to access on the web due to some ancient HTML, so I'm taking the still-relevant posts from there (2002 into early 2003) and putting them into the appropriate categories.
Three dozen or so have been added in the last week or two, and more are coming. I'm fishing everything out of the Internet Archive, so all links are in there, although they're not all guaranteed to still work. (I do have the day job at the Wonder Drug Factory, y'know.) After that I'm going to categorize the Pipeline posts from the pre-Movable Type days, so those will start showing up over there, too. Enjoy (I hope), and keep an eye out for more (semi-)new content.
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July 9, 2005
Posted by Derek
Just wanted to let everyone know that posting will be light to nonexistent this week. I'll pop up if something big happens, but otherwise I'm going to be taking it easy for a few days. The regular schedule of fist-waving and table-pounding will resume a week from Monday, though, never fear.
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July 5, 2005
Posted by Derek
I'm taking another vacation day today. No doubt my labmates are cranking out the discoveries in my abscence - just like working at the sawmill, I tell people.
While I'm lounging around here, you might check out Princeton's "Art of Science" competition here. See you tomorrow!
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May 20, 2005
Posted by Derek
Home and work have conspired to leave no time for a post this morning - man, I wish those two wouldn't team up so often; they're supposed to not even be friends or anything.
But you can head over to the science/medicine blogfest called Tangled Bank and find a lot of good stuff, written by a lot of good people that I need to blogroll. Enjoy, and I'll see everyone on Monday.
(Oh, one other thing on the outside-reading front. Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds mentions that he has a law-school colleague who tried to build a Dune-style "stillsuit" some years back, and adduces this as proof of her geek credentials. Point taken, but let me pull my papers out for inspection. A more technically inclined geek would have realized the physics problem that Frank Herbert sort of, er, skipped over. The major point of sweating in hot weather is evaporative cooling. What happens when you trap that moisture and try to recycle it? Condensative heating, that's what, which you don't hear about as much but is as real as the laws of thermodynamics can make it. A stillsuit would cook you like a crock-pot.)
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March 12, 2005
Posted by Derek
I wanted to point out that my email address has changed. After fifteen years (!), my old AOL address is no more. DSL connectivity has finally crept into our corner of the world, so now send your comments, complaints, and (not least) offers of gainful freelance goodness to me at: derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net.
The fine print: No immediate family members of deceased strongmen, please. No offers to elongate any part of my body will be considered. And I already have all the cheap insurance and discount toner cartridges that one man can handle.
Oh, and the next post here will be Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning. For plenty of science-themed reading material (more than a couple of day's worth, that's for sure), try the Tangled Bank.
Also, William Tozier has an interesting pile of science and art-related stuff here, and the latter is well represented, as usual, over at Two Blowhards. There, I've done my part for productivity.
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February 7, 2005
Posted by Derek
Before I start off tonight, I wanted to welcome another advertiser on the site, the folks at GenomeWeb over there in the corner. Glad to have 'em!
Thanks to the people who commented on yesterday's question. My Corantean overlord(s) suggested a useful solution as well, since (as Jack Vinson guessed), I'm set up to only display the most recent posts on the front page. Pasting in the old material, saving it as a draft, and then changing its date sends it directly to the category without having it appear up front.
So, the first thing I've added from the archives is my series on chemical warfare, which was written in September of 2002. It's in that "Chem/Bio Warfare" category over on the right, naturally enough. (This was written in the run-up to the Iraq war, and the last post in the series was soon overtaken by events. I note, though, that I speculated that Iraq might have far less in its stockpiles than people had estimated - I just didn't realize quite how much less.) But most of the series is still worth a read, if you're interested in that sort of thing. You'll learn about the morning that a German chemist first synthesized |
