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An accomplished actor best known for his portrayal of Captain Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce in the US television series M*A*S*H, Alan Alda has taken on another impactful role in recent years: champion of science communication. Having served for 14 years as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, a public television show devoted to explaining recent advances in science and technology, in
I’ve always enjoyed fragment-based drug discovery, and I was a reasonably early adopter in the lab. For those outside the field, the idea here is to avoid screening libraries of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of drug-sized compounds against your desired target, looking for one that binds well. Instead, you start from far smaller collections of, well, far smaller compounds. These &l;
So let me say two things immediately about the now-published results for lecanemab, the latest attempt at anti-amyloid antibody therapy for Alzheimer’s. I think that both of these are true: the numbers are the best that I have yet seen for such an antibody, and at the same time I doubt if the drug will actually make a difference in the treatment of Alzheimer’s.
I realize that this is i
Editor's Blog
An accomplished actor best known for his portrayal of Captain Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce in the US television series M*A*S*H, Alan Alda has taken on another impactful role in recent years: champion of science communication. Having served for 14 years as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, a public television show devoted to explaining recent advances in science and technology, in
Royce W. Murray, a pioneer in electrochemistry, chemically modified electrodes, self-assembled monolayers, and ionic liquids, died on 6 July at age 85. Much of how we think about modifying surfaces and measuring changes induced by those modifications comes from Murray’s lab. Murray’s scientific accomplishments have been enumerated elsewhere, but those who knew him will best remember hi
Ten years ago, an editorial in Science remarked on how little progress had been made on improving the postdoctoral experience since a landmark report in 2000 detailed the variability of such positions. Postdoctoral scholars (postdocs) are hardly better off in 2022; however, postdoctoral fellowship programs can serve as the nuclei for changes that have long been recognized as necessary for improvin
The past 2 years have been a period of mourning, anger, fear, and exhaustion for Asian Americans: 16% of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, up from 12.5% in 2020; 31% worry “all the time” or “often” about being victimized because of their race; and 36% have changed their routines over concerns about personal safety. Despite the increase in anti-Asian
Our food system is a rich, complex blend of biology and culture. From the biodiversity in forests, oceans, and farms to the living weave of long-standing traditions and emerging trends, food touches every aspect of life on Earth. This diversity hasn’t always carried through to agricultural and culinary literatures, but fortunately this is changing. Fresh perspectives are emerging in the lite
Three weeks ago, I wrote about how graduate education is still in serious need of reform and pointed to a NextGen Voices piece that we ran describing how principal investigators can be better mentors. Recently, I learned that two outstanding chemistry professors—Jen Heemstra at Emory University and Neil Garg at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)—had launched an initiative
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Visuals
Have you ever wondered why some research makes science news and other research doesn’t? Of course, content is king but in addition to having significant findings, strong visuals can catch the attention of the press and larger audiences. It pays to spend some time taking high-quality photos of your work and putting them somewhere a photo editor (a person like me that seeks out pictures for news sto
I remember first learning about the nuclear pore. It was in high school biology, and I was immediately struck by how it looked. Its symmetry certainly stands out: eight copies of a protein unit arranged in a ring, encircling an opening in the nuclear membrane. And they cover the nucleus like holes in a colander (if that colander was very choosy about what it let through). The next thing one notice
Working with animals is unpredictable by nature. To them, there are always more interesting things to be doing, fresh smells to sniff, and new acquaintances to make. After reading the paper on dog breed stereotypes for the 29 April issue of Science, I knew we had to have a cover with as many dogs as possible. But if you’ve ever walked by a doggy daycare, you know it’s nearly impossible to get a group of dogs to focus on one thing, let alone sit still for a portrait.
I was fascinated by the complex shape of the intricate glass sculpture. Yet it was only 4.5 millimeters tall—less than the thickness of a No. 2 pencil. But the small scale posed a big problem: Would a photograph of such a minute object work as a Science cover?
In the Pipeline
I’ve always enjoyed fragment-based drug discovery, and I was a reasonably early adopter in the lab. For those outside the field, the idea here is to avoid screening libraries of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of drug-sized compounds against your desired target, looking for one that binds well. Instead, you start from far smaller collections of, well, far smaller compounds. These &l;
So let me say two things immediately about the now-published results for lecanemab, the latest attempt at anti-amyloid antibody therapy for Alzheimer’s. I think that both of these are true: the numbers are the best that I have yet seen for such an antibody, and at the same time I doubt if the drug will actually make a difference in the treatment of Alzheimer’s.
I realize that this is i
The attempts to “close the loop” of automated chemistry experimentation and software-driven optimization continue, as well they should. There are a lot of details to be filled in, with both the hardware and the software, but (as with many computational goals) there seems to be no fundamental reason that would keep it from working.
Here’s a new paper with the latest in this area,
Two of my recent post topics (on antibody-drug conjugates and on accelerated approval) have intersected today. In the former, I mentioned in passing the ADCs that are conjugated to a very cytotoxic anticancer agent called monomethyl auristatin E, and there are several. A related compound (monomethyl auristatin F) has also been used in a recent ADC from GlaxoSmithKline, Blenrep. In that one, the an
I’ve been seeing some photographs recently of old-style sources of chemical information - volumes of Beilstein, of the Chemical Abstracts Collective Indices, of Aldrich catalogs. A vanished world! The first reaction I ever did in a research chemistry lab was to remove the three acetyls off of tri-O-acetyl D-glucal with sodium methoxide in methanol, and that reaction is the same as it ever wa
I’ve mentioned “enzyme envy” among organic chemists many times over the years. I well recall laboring away on the total synthesis of an antibiotic natural product in graduate school, and occasionally reflecting on how the compound itself had been discovered in a culture of soil from a golf course in Texas. Here I was, in front of my fume hood at two in the morning trying to get S