Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a workshop at the NIH on the National Cancer Institute Clinical Development of Small Molecules:

This one-day workshop will provide specialized training and information to NCI-supported investigators who plan to undertake clinical development of novel concepts and who are directly involved with implementing translational clinical research.

Mitch Waldrop has written an informative piece on the Science 2.0 movement in Scientific American:



Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?



Consistent with the content of the article, Mitch invites feedback:

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

Chemical research has traditionally been organized in either experiment-centric or molecule-centric models. This makes sense from the chemist's standpoint. When we think about doing chemistry, we conceptualize experiments as the fundamental unit of progress. This is reflected in the laboratory notebook, where each page is an experiment, with an objective, a procedure, the results, their analysis and a final conclusion optimally directly answering the stated objective. When we think about searching for chemistry, we generally imagine molecules and transformations.

I recently reported on a new collaborator who agreed to work with us in the open on modelling subcellular drug transport. I am very pleased to report that Gus Rosania has now created an entire wiki (1CellPK) for his lab to use as an open notebook.

Rajarshi Guha has yet again made a key contribution to our UsefulChem project by connecting us with Gus Rosania at the University of Michigan. Gus is interested in a fully open collaboration to help us further prioritize our drug targets based on predicted subcellular drug transport:

It is the first time I hear about Open Notebook Science, but it sounds like a fantastic idea! My research group studies the subcellular transport of small molecules.

This term, the students in my organic chemistry class were presented with an opportunity to do an extra credit assignment using Second Life to represent concepts they learned in the course. When I was an undergraduate, finding molecules in articles was mainly done using the Chemical Abstracts books. A convenient way to find a specific molecule would be to look up the molecular formula and find the corresponding IUPAC name. Theoretically, one could figure out the IUPAC name from scratch but this can be very tricky for complex molecules and prone to error.