/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-08-25T07:19:55-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/08/25/how_not_to_do_it_water_aspirators.php You need access to vacuum if you’re going to work at the bench in chemistry. In fact, you need more than one kind. Reasonably hard vacuum (well, by our standards, which is laughable by the standards of the physicists) is... 73513@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ How Not to Do It 2008-08-25T07:19:55-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/08/19/fighting_boredom_profitably.php I wanted to recommend this post by Milkshake over at Org Prep Daily (and not just because he liked the recent column I wrote for Chemistry World). I was writing about the limited number of reactions that some med-chem labs... 73500@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-08-19T07:40:09-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/28/questions_you_dont_necessarily_want_the_answers_to_.php 1. “Hey, who dropped that condenser out on the floor in front of my hood? That looks just like the one I had on my reaction flask. . .” 2. “How come the toxicology people haven’t called me about our... 73469@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-07-28T07:32:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/21/backtracking_necessary_and_unnecessary.php One of the things that no one realizes about research (until they’ve done some) is how much time can be spent going back over things. Right now I’m fighting some experiments that should be working, have worked in the past,... 73452@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-07-21T07:24:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/18/lowes_law_of_diurnal_distribution.php Here’s an appropriate topic for a Friday, although at first many of you may think I’ve lost my mind. What would happen if you combed the full text of the experimental sections of the chemistry journals, looking for how long... 73448@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-07-18T07:22:46-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/09/hows_the_new_boss_doing.php Here’s a question that came up in a discussion at work the other day: when a new head of research comes in, how long should you give them before judging how they’re doing? That’s a tough one to answer, I... 73429@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-07-09T07:32:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/03/i_can_has_ugly_molecules.php A colleague and I were talking the other day about some of the molecules that turn up when you dig through a company's internal database. This was a favorite sport of mine during slow afternoons at the Wonder Drug Factory... 73417@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-07-03T07:27:19-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/04/tote_that_barge_lift_that_bale.php I was talking with a colleague recently about the different cultures that have grown up in different drug companies where lab associates are concerned. For those outside the industry, those are non-PhD-holding scientists, who (for the most part) do not... 73349@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-06-04T07:15:32-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/06/03/oops.php We recently encountered a problem that’s (unfortunately) a rather common one. An enzyme assay turned up an interesting hit compound, with some characteristics that we were hoping to see for leads against our target. A re-test showed that yes, the... 73345@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-06-03T07:20:14-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/30/ah_glassware.php Well, while the mail continues to come in about my post yesterday, I’m going to pull back from the global perspective and zoom back into the glassware drawers of my lab bench today. A while back I wrote about the... 73341@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-05-30T07:13:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/20/the_miracle_solvent.php For those who were wondering, my copper reactions the other day worked out just fine. They started out a beautiful blue (copper iodide and an amino acid in straight DMSO – if that’s not blue it’s maybe going to be... 73321@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-05-20T07:19:37-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/15/copper_a_gentlemans_disagreement.php 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.... 73303@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Inorganic Chemistry 2008-05-15T07:28:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/14/summer_student_time.php I have a summer intern this year, and she has (so far) not caused anything to burst into flames. That’s the first thing you ask of a summer student, and the fact that she’s gotten several reactions to work is... 73297@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-05-14T07:33:18-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/12/explaining_it_all.php 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... 73289@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-05-12T07:56:15-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/05/naming_of_names.php We order chemicals from all sorts of suppliers – big, reputable outfits like Sigma-Aldrich-Fluka all the way down to places that none of us even have heard of before. In those latter cases, the primary question is always whether or... 73277@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Life in the Drug Labs 2008-05-05T07:23:57-05:00