/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2013-05-02T07:18:27-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/05/02/e_o_wilsons_letters_to_a_young_scientist.php I've been reading E. O. Wilson's new book, Letters to a Young Scientist. It's the latest addition to the list of "advice from older famous scientists" books, which also includes Peter Medawar's similarly titled Advice To A Young Scientist and... 76384@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Book Recommendations 2013-05-02T07:18:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/29/just_work_on_the_winners.php That Lamar Smith proposal I wrote about earlier this morning can be summarized as "Why don't you people just work on the good stuff?" And I thought it might be a good time to link back to a personal experience... 76375@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2013-04-29T09:41:35-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/03/astrazenecas_move_to_hot_happening_cambridge.php If you're looking for a sunny, optimistic take on AstraZeneca's move to Cambridge in the UK, the Telegraph has it for you right here. It's a rousing, bullish take on the whole Cambridge scene, but as John Carroll points out... 76322@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2013-04-03T06:55:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/20/thought_for_the_day_on_interdisciplinary_research.php This quote caught my eye fromNature's "Trade Secrets" blog, covering a recent conference. Note that the Prof. Leggett mentioned is a 2003 Nobel physics laureate: It’s been a recent trend to mix disciplines and hope the results will solve some... 76281@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2013-03-20T11:55:02-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/01/yuri_milners_millions_and_where_theyre_going.php You'll have heard about Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur (early Facebook investor, etc.) who's recently announced some rather generous research prize awards: Yesterday, Milner, along with some “old friends”—Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and their respective wives—announced... 76247@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Academia (vs. Industry) 2013-03-01T07:35:11-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/21/an_anniversary.php I wanted to repost an old entry of mine, from back in 2002 (!) It's appropriate this week, and just as I was in 2002, I'm a couple of days late with the commemeration: I missed a chance yesterday to... 76225@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2013-02-21T08:55:50-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/12/07/whitesides_on_discovery_and_development.php George Whitesides of Harvard has a good editorial in the journal Lab on a Chip. He's talking about the development of microassays, but goes on to generalize about the new technologies - how they're found, and how they're taken up... 76056@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2012-12-07T11:06:54-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/30/a_broadside_against_the_way_we_do_things_now.php There's a paper out in Drug Discovery Today with the title "Is Poor Research the Cause of Declining Productivity in the Drug Industry? After reviewing the literature on phenotypic versus target-based drug discovery, the author (Frank Sams-Dodd) asks (and has... 76037@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Development 2012-11-30T07:41:31-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/13/nassim_taleb_on_scientific_discovery.php There's an interesting article posted on Nassim Taleb's web site, titled "Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility)". It was recommended to me by a friend, and I've been reading it over for its thoughts on how we do... 75995@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2012-11-13T09:43:50-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/10/09/the_age_of_nobel_chemistry_laureates.php In anticipation of tomorrow's Nobel Prize, here's a graph of the average age of Nobel chemistry laureates. (Link via Stuart Cantrill). It runs about like you'd figure - lots of people in their 50s, which should make some of us... 75921@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2012-10-09T10:01:39-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/27/chemistrys_mute_black_swans.php What's a Black Swan Event in chemistry? Longtime industrial chemist Bill Nugent has a very interesting article in Angewandte Chemie with that theme, and it's well worth a look. He details several examples of things that all organic chemists thought... 75835@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Drug Industry History 2012-08-27T07:21:08-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/06/biotech_clusters.php How important is it to have a "anchor" company in a regional bio/pharma cluster? How do you get a thriving cluster of biotech companies, anyway? There are a lot of cities that would like the answers to these questions, not... 75792@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2012-08-06T10:37:22-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/06/21/scientific_literacy_where_do_you_stop.php Now here is a piece on scientific literacy that I find interesting. The author, Daniel Sarewitz, is wondering why so many people equate it with knowing facts: We have this belief that unless a person knows that the Earth rotates... 75714@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2012-06-21T10:20:33-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/06/18/more_more_scientists_debate.php My recent post here on whether the US needs a big influx of scientists and engineers has attracted some attention. Discover magazine asked to reprint it on their site, and then Slate asked if I would write a response for... 75704@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2012-06-18T07:39:03-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/06/06/how_not_to_do_science_education.php Slate has one of those assume-the-conclusions articles up on science and technology education in the US. It's right there in the title: "America Needs More Scientists and Engineers". Now, I can generally agree that America (and the world) needs more... 75689@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2012-06-06T06:45:59-05:00