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A Magic Methyl, Spotted in the Wild
You hear medicinal chemists talking about the “magic methyl”, the big effect that a single CH3 group can have on potency or selectivity. Here’s a new J. Med. Chem. paper that shows one in action.That...
View ArticleNostalgie de la Boue
Alfred Bader’s passing reminds me that there’s an earlier generation – now almost completely gone – that regarded the likes of Aldrich Chemical as fancy upstarts. There has (had?) always been a...
View ArticleThe Downside of Chemistry Automation
Automation in chemistry (especially industrial chemistry) is so pervasive that we hardly even notice it any more. (I have a whole talk that I give that’s partly on that very subject). But what is...
View ArticleThe Killer Experiment
Bruce Booth has some thoughts here on a recent Harvard Business Review piece on startups, but don’t let the fact that it’s from HBR put you off from taking a look. The original article is focused on...
View ArticleLilly’s Virtual Med-Chem Assistant
Here’s an interesting new paper from Lilly (brought to my attention by Ash Jogalekar on Twitter). “Creating a virtual assistant for medicinal chemistry” is the title, but fear not: this is not...
View ArticleBuried Treasure – Of a Sort
A former colleague was telling me the other day about some not-so-pleasant surprises that occurred when he was helping to clean out a lab that hadn’t had some cabinets opened in a while, and I think...
View ArticleAre Medicinal Chemists Taking It Too Easy?
I was speaking to a university audience the other day (over Zoom, of course) and as I often do I mentioned the studies that have looked at what kinds of reactions medicinal chemists actually use. The...
View ArticleThe Big Problems
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about yesterday’s protein folding news as it relates to drug discovery. And while I did a post on that last year, I thought it might be useful to briefly lay out the...
View ArticleLab! Of! The! Future!
This is a good article at C&E News on the “lab of the future”, and I’ll go ahead and make the standard comment that this has been the lab of the future for quite a while now. The idea is to have...
View ArticleHow Not to Be That Chemist
I enjoyed this Twitter thread very much from “Bob the Grumpy Med Chemist”. It leads off with a document that pops up periodically on the internet, a guide to sabotage that was put out by the OSS...
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