Author: David Bradley

Blogging to Save the World

Imagine a blog that does more than flatter the ego of its creator and those it links to…imagine a blog that might actually be useful!

Dr Jean-Claude Bradley [no relation] an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Drexel University emailed to tell me that he has set up a blog that will join the dots between real scientific problems and concrete and actionable solutions.

For example, one posting presents 90 molecules that stand a good chance of being inhibitors of the enzyme HIV protease, which is essential to viral replication. “To the best of my knowledge,” Bradley told me, “these compounds have not yet been tested.”

However, in order to complete the trail from problem to solution, he says we need a cheap and efficient synthesis for each of these leads, so that they can be tested in vitro for activity against HIV. “The intended audience for the blog is mainly chemists,” he confesses, “and I would like there to be as much experimental detail provided as required for a chemist to understand fully how to reproduce the porposed and executed syntheses.”

Bradley also revealed that, as you’d expect, he has an organic chemistry lab at his disposal and is willing to execute proposed syntheses, if they make synthetic sense.
Bradley hopes to find similar specific problems in which a chemical synthesis or a specific compound or class or compounds is needed that could make a difference to solving the most important problems facing humanity today.

So, if you’ve got a chemistry degree don’t hang around, go to his blog and save the world!

Homeopathic Flu Remedy

It’s rather worrying to see the proliferation of books about avian influenza, as if people aren’t scared enough, but this one is more worrying still – its title alludes to the idea that homeopathy can somehow help us survive influenza epidemics and pandemics. Bizarrely, it says we can survive “past, present and future” episodes. Present and future are really pushing it, given the lack of valid trials of homeopathy in any area of medicine, but “past”?

Forget H5N1, H3N0 is a killer too

According to the People’s Daily Online, the first Vietnamese have died of H3N0 another strain of the influenza A virus, related to but different from the increasingly familiar H5N1. From the scaremongering point of view, there’s no need to hold the frontpage (at least outside Vietnam) as this strain is far less virulent than H5N1.

However, it does bring to light an aspect of flu viruses that gets little mention in the media – avian influenza has killed very few people, especially compared with the number of annual deaths from human influenza, but should any of these avian strains jump between species they are likely to lose their virulence to a great degree. One flu expert told us that, “H5N1 will surely decrease in lethality as it becomes more infectious between humans…no doubt about it.” More on that next week…

Elemental Discoveries on the Radio

Sheffield University’s WebElements guru Mark Winter alerted us to a recent BBC Radio 4 [link dead] series touching on Periodic Tales told by members of the cast of long-lived rural radio soap The Archers…

  • Krypton: Hedli Nicklaus on the Superman element, krypton
  • Helium: Brian Perkins dramatises the effects of Helium
  • Silver: Trevor Harrison finds some unusual properties of Silver
  • Cobalt: Nicklaus takes on the goblin element of cobalt
  • Selenium: Carole Boyd unearths selenium
  • Oxygen: Perkins bravely dramatises the effects of oxygen
  • Arsenic: Charlotte Green takes on the deadly history of arsenic
  • Mercury: Boyd reflects on mercury, the poisonous liquid metal
  • Iodine: Green on the discovery of iodine’s essential place in brain development
  • Nickel: Harrison reveals that the space station Mir is largely made of nickel.

It seems a little more worthy than recent efforts to connect and elements and celebrities, which I mentioned recently, despite the fact that they got radio soap stars to do the task, but presumably has the same conceptual origins of getting chemistry a better name, which can only be a good thing.

Molecular Model of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu)

tamiflu molecular structurePremier molecular modeller Stephan Logan has produced for us a timely reminder of the chemical structure of Tamiflu, the antiviral flu drug. You can order the necessary components to build the Molecular Model of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and other molecules from Stephan’s site. Perfect for that avian flu lecture!

In case you missed my how to avoid colds and flu article, it’s once again taking pride of place on the sciencebase site.

Synthesis of Propecia

structure of propecia
Regular SciObs readers will know that one of my favourite web hobbies is spotting the odd and the weird among the keywords that bring visitors to the sciencebase site. This week, I have been mostly seeing “synthesis of propecia” and wondered whether the visitor demographic had changed from hirsute to those with cranial follicular challenge…hence the interest in Propecia (finasteride)

Anyway, for those who’d like to see the molecular structure of Propecia here it is. The synthesis of Propecia is available elsewhere on the web.

Bacterial Viruses

In his otherwise intriguing book, Digital Fortress ($7.99 in paperback from Amazon US), author Dan Brown makes several schoolboy errors. For instance, top of page 69 he says that, “Computer viruses were as varied as bacterial viruses…”

I doubt he is referring to bacteriophages here and is simply making the mistake that bacteria and viruses are essentially one and the same, i.e. germs! That aside, computer viruses are by no real measure as varied as biological viruses. There are, of course literally tens of thousands of computer viruses and worms, but essentially they are all variants of a few hundred that exist “in the wild”. In contrast, there is at least one virus for every species on earth…and that’s almost beyond counting.