All articles by Derek Lowe – Page 4
-
Opinion
Embracing structural disorder
Medicinal chemists need to overcome their fear of fuzzy proteins
-
Opinion
Has x-ray had its day?
Will the giant of structure determination be toppled by blasts from electron beams?
-
Opinion
The silent rise of the robots
Mechanical helpers have been creeping into our labs for decades
-
Opinion
Is this a golden age of new drug classes?
A host of new treatment modes are hitting the clinic and the market
-
Opinion
It's complicated
In a complex world, binary answers are often requested but rarely sufficient
-
Opinion
Management by numbers
Reducing intellectual processes to metrics runs the risk of people working to the numbers not the goal
-
Opinion
Would you buy synthetic wine?
Can we replicate the chemical profiles of famously expensive drinks? And would people drink them?
-
Opinion
We’re going to need a bigger flask
Scaling up reactions is easy to get wrong in a variety of ways
-
Opinion
What are the rate-limiting steps in drug discovery?
Getting more drugs to market is not just a chemistry problem
-
Opinion
How science shapes our psychology
We learn to embrace the unexpected, follow evidence over opinion and accept that most experiments fail
-
Opinion
What would a 1980s student make of modern research?
Nano- and macromolecular science might make for a shocking read in the launderette
-
Opinion
The projects drug companies wish they’d never started
Failures are common in drug research, but some are bigger than others
-
Opinion
Feeding the confusion
When it comes to working out what foods do to our bodies, mostly we just don’t know
-
Opinion
'If I'd discovered metformin, I'd have tossed it aside...'
Trusting our intuition too strongly highlights how little we know about chemical activity
-
Opinion
The three muses of scientific discovery
Inspiration, experimentation and happy accidents are all pathways to a breakthrough
-
Opinion
Why combination pills aren’t always the answer
The challenges of medicines containing multiple drugs aren’t going away
-
Opinion
Will robots make you redundant?
Smart machines could soon outpace even the best organic chemist