How Cool Are Chemists?

Yawns Are Cool

Although we yawn each and every day, most people have little understanding of why we do it. In fact, the function of yawning has remained mysterious for centuries, even among scientists, and this has only changed quite recently. Contrary to what people have believed for a long time, it is now understood that yawns have nothing to do with breathing or the amount of oxygen we are taking in. Inste...

Food Taxes: How Likely Are Likely Effects?

How well do medicinal chemists learn from experience?

To an outsider, the exploration of thousands of molecules to find a small number of potential candidate drugs must appear enormously wasteful, but many medicinal chemists would defend this waste as unavoidable. Here, I provide evidence that suggests that modern medicinal chemists are overproductive in that they synthesise many more compounds than are required to achieve the objectives of the pr...

Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sports: How Chemists Catch Users

What do the following prominent athletes have in common: Floyd Landis,MarkMcGwire,Marion Jones, Ben Johnson, and Lyle Alzado? All have been suspected of using performanceenhancing drugs (PEDs) in recent decades and have eventually confessed. Over this period, major doping investigations have included the BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative) case, which involved doping in various sports inst...

Follow-on drugs: how far should chemists look?

A major remark made by observers relates to the focus of the pharmaceutical industry on 'me-too' drugs rather than 'first-in-class' drugs, the latter are considered to be 'truly' innovative medicines. Although the subject is heavily debated, chemists in project teams around the globe are routinely following up compounds from competitors. An important strategic consideration is the degree of che...