A Quick Recipe: Lime Sorbet
This is not a complicated thing to make, but it's terrific. My family and I polished off a large batch of it last night - it's still warm and humid enough around here to make it an excellent dessert. The only thing you need is some sort of stirring ice-cream freezer - we have one of those where you put the cylinder in the freezer for a day, and then turn a hand crank. But anything will work, as long as it's cold enough and allows you to keep mixing.
The ingredient list is short. Fresh lime juice really is essential, though, although if you have lemons around, lemon sorbet is (naturally) the same recipe, and is also excell...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Totally Off Topic: My Appearance on Jeopardy!
I've had several requests for details about the time I was a Jeopardy! contestant, since I mentioned it in passing the other day. So for the holiday weekend, I thought I'd provide the story. This was all back in 1995-1996, when I lived in New Jersey, and that's actually how I got into the entire business. Coworkers had told me about how the Merv Griffin production people would be administering the test to get on the show down at the Resort International casino in Atlantic City (also owned by the Griffin company), so I drove down to try it out.
The test was only a short one, meant to be done quickly as a screen, and none o...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 30, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Welcome to the Author's Brain. The "Fasten Seatbelts" Sign Is Illuminated
This article is therefore about developing recursive intrinsic self-reflexive as de- and/or resubjective always evolving living research designs. Inquiry perhaps full stop—me: An auto-brain—biography and/or a brain theorizing itself; me theorizing my brain. It is thus about theorizing bodily here brain and transcorporeal materialities, in ways that neither push us back into any traps of biological determinism or cultural essentialism, nor make us leave bodily matter and biologies behind.
Apprarently, most of the manuscript is taken up with those "This is about. . ." constructions, which doesn't make for easy readi...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 30, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
A New Pathway For Memory
As someone who will not be seeing the age of 50 again, I find a good deal of hope in a study out this week from Eric Kandel and co-workers at Columbia. In Science Translational Medicine, they report results from a gene expression study in human brain samples. Looking at the dentate gyrus region of the hippocampus, long known to be crucial in memory formation and retrieval, they found several proteins to have differential expression in younger tissue samples versus older ones. Both sets were from otherwise healthy individuals - no Alzheimer's, for example.
RbAp48 (also known as RBBP4 and NURF55), a protein involved in hist...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 29, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs
How Goes the War?
There's an article at The Atlantic titled "More Money Won't Win the War on Cancer". I agree with the title, although it's worth remembering that lack of money will certainly lose it. Money, in basic research, is very much in the "necessary but not sufficient" category.
The article itself is making the case of a book by Clifton Leaf, The Truth in Small Doses, a project that started with this article in Fortune in 2004. Here's the pitch:
What if a lack of research funding isn’t really the problem? One reason we aren’t making faster progress against cancer, according to Leaf, is because the federal grant process often c...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 29, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Mercury Azides. I'll Get Right On Those For You.
Azides have featured several times in the Things I Won't Work With series, starting with simple little things like, say, fluorine azide and going up to all kinds of ridiculous, gibbering, nitrogen-stuffed detonation bait. But for simplicity, it's hard to beat a good old metal azide compound, although if you're foolhardy enough to actually beat one of them it'll simply blow you up.
There's a new paper in Angewandte Chemie that illustrates this point in great detail. It provides the world with the preparation of all kinds of mercury azides, and any decent chemist will be wincing already. In general, the bigger and fluffier...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 28, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Things I Won ' t Work With Source Type: blogs
Promise That Didn't Pan Out
Luke Timmerman has a good piece on a drug (Bexxar) that looked useful, had a lot of time, effort, and money spent on it, but still never made any real headway. GSK has announced that they're ceasing production, and if there are headlines about that, I've missed them. Apparently there were only a few dozen people in the entire US who got the drug at all last year.
When you look at the whole story, there’s no single reason for failure. There were regulatory delays, manufacturing snafus, strong competition, reimbursement challenges, and issues around physician referral patterns.
If this story sounds familiar, it should—...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Not Sent Out For Review
Blogger Pete over at Fragment-Based Drug Discovery has a tale to tell about trying to get a paper published. He sent in a manuscript on alkane/water partition coefficients to the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, only to get back the "not sent out for review" response. That's the worst, the "We're not even going to consider this one" letter. And the odd thing is that, as he rightly put it, this does sound like a JCIM sort of paper, but the editor's response was that it was inappropriate for the journal, and that they had "limited interest" in QSAR/QSPR studies.
So off the paper went to the Journal of Computer-...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
On Conspiratorial Thinking
I recently had a e-mail exchange with someone who wanted me to read one of the many books out there that claims that some particular food additive is poisoning everyone. I'm not linking to the stuff, so I'll call the book's author Dr. Cassandra, for short. We argued about data and mechanisms a bit, but my correspondent also brought up what he felt were many other conspiracies around food and health, and I couldn't agree with him on any of those, either. That led to me writing this to him:
Let me get philosophical: one of the big problems with this sort of thinking is deciding what to trust. If you decide that Most Of What...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Snake Oil Source Type: blogs
Amgen Buys Onyx
So Amgen's bid for Onyx look like it's going through, and the reaction of John Carroll at FiercePharma was to tweet "Expect big layoffs soon". He took some flak for being such a downer, but he's right, as far as I can see. Amgen isn't buying Onyx for their research staff, or any of their people at all. As that Bloomberg story linked to above has it, "Amgen to Buy Onyx for $10.4 Billion to Gain Cancer Drug".
That's Kyprolis (carfilzomib), their proteasome inhibitor, and that's all they need from Onyx, who bought the compound anyway when they acquired Proteolix a few years ago. So since I don't want to be a downer either, e...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 26, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Options And Suchlike
And after that mention of CEO pay, this sounds like a good time to link to this article from Nature Biotechnology. If you've ever been curious about why different companies pay out in stock options and/or restricted stock, this will satisfy your curiosity and more. A big part of the answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is the tax code, and if you're someone getting these kinds of compensation, you need to know some tax angles from your end, too.
And, of course, the type of award that works out best for the company doesn't always work out best for the grantee. Likewise, not every grantee will be best served by a sing...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
What's a CEO Worth?
In the case of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, the stock market appears to be saying "About minus 18 billion dollars". As Alex Tabarrok notes here, that sort of puts average CEO compensation in perspective. . .do we have some bigwigs in this business who could do as much for their shareholders by following Ballmer's example? (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - August 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Chemistry On The End of DNA
We chemists have always looked at the chemical machinery of living systems with a sense of awe. A billion years of ruthless pruning (work, or die) have left us with some bizarrely efficient molecular catalysts, the enzymes that casually make and break bonds with a grace and elegance that our own techniques have trouble even approaching. The systems around DNA replication are particularly interesting, since that's one of the parts you'd expect to be under the most selection pressure (every time a cell divides, things had better work).
But we're not content with just standing around envying the polymerase chain reaction and...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 23, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Assays Source Type: blogs
Too Many Metrics
Here's a new paper from Michael Shultz of Novartis, who is trying to cut through the mass of metrics for new compounds. I cannot resist quoting his opening paragraph, but I do not have a spare two hours to add all the links:
Approximately 15 years ago Lipinski et al. published their seminal work linking molecular properties with oral absorption.1 Since this ‘Big Bang’ of physical property analysis, the universe of parameters, rules and optimization metrics has been expanding at an ever increasing rate (Figure 1).2 Relationships with molecular weight (MW), lipophilicity,3 and 4 ionization state,5 pKa, molecular volume ...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 22, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs
A Call For Merck to Cut R&D
This is just what people working in R&D at Merck don't want to see. According to FiercePharma, a prominent analyst is urging the company to get its finances in line with its competitors. . .by cutting R&D.
Seamus Fernandez at Leerink Swann says that Merck should reduce their expenditures in that area by around a billion dollars, which is at least 8 times deeper than the new R&D head, Roger Perlmutter, has talked about. Here's the whole analysis, which includes this:
We believe a major restructuring at MRK is necessary; movement here likely would be well-received. As pressure builds on MRK mgmt to: (1) improve R&D product...
Source: In the Pipeline - August 21, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
