TW: stereotypes about molecular dynamics. In his fantastic essay “The Two Cultures,” C. P. Snow observed that there was (in 1950s England) a growing divide between the academic cultures of science and the humanities: He reflects on the origins of this phenomenon, which he contends is new to the 20th century, and argues that it ought to be opposed: Snow’s essay is wonderful: his portrait of a vanishing cultural intellectual unity should

An important problem with simulating chemical reactions is that reactions generally take place in solvent, but most simulations are run without solvent molecules.

TW: sarcasm. Today, most research is done by academic labs funded mainly by the government. Many articles have been written on the shortcomings with academic research: Sam Rodriques recently had a nice post about how academia is ultimately an educational institution, and how this limits the quality of academic research. (It’s worth a read;

The concept of p K _a is introduced so early in the organic chemistry curriculum that it’s easy to overlook what a remarkable idea it is. Briefly, for the non-chemists reading this: p K _a is defined as the negative base-10 logarithm of the acidity constant of a given acid H–A: p K _a := -log ₁₀ ([HA]/[A-][H+]) Unlike pH, which describes the acidity of a bulk solution,

You are a scientist, not a lab monkey. You ought not to view your degree as “six years of hard labor in the chemistry mines.” Always make time to go to interesting seminars, talk with other people about their research, and read the literature. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a scientist? Only one person is really looking out for your best interests: you.

I’ve been pretty critical of peer review in the past, arguing that it doesn’t accomplish much, contributes to status quo bias, etc.

I first encountered organic chemistry on Wikipedia, my freshman year of high school.

I started this blog one year ago today, with a post on site-selective glycosylation.

Not Boring recently published a panegyric about Varda, a startup that’s trying to create “space factories making drugs in orbit.” When I first read this description, alarm bells went off in my head—why would anyone try to make drugs in space?

(with apologies to Maimonides and Nozick) Screening on only one substrate before assessing the substrate scope. This is the “ordinary means” in methods development. Screening on one substrate, but choosing a substrate that worked poorly in a previous study (e.g.). This can be thought of as serial multi-substrate screening, where each substrate is a separate project, but the body of work achieves greater generality over time.

Much ink has been spilled on whether scientific progress is slowing down or not (e.g.).