It’s always good to hear about an older compound that may be doing good things that we didn’t realize.

Blogging time is short today, since I’m on a deadline to produce a couple of posters for presentation. These are for an internal hoe-down, unfortunately, so I won’t be able to share the fruits of my labors with everyone out there in the readership. With any luck, though, they’ll turn into public presentations/publications eventually, though

Over at BoingBoing, they’re investigating the question: “How long would your PhD have taken if everything worked the first time ?” I have to admit, it took me a few minutes to adjust my head to that idea, since God knows, nothing in my PhD ever looked like working the first time. And it’s a hard one to answer, because I had to do some backtracking, as so often happens in total synthesis. This was of the “Dang it all, turns out I can’t install that carbon at that step, so I’m going to have to go back, put it in earlier, and hope the downstream stuff still works” variety

Chad Orzel has a post up on the two halves of physics, and about how people tend to forget one of them: the experimentalists. I think he’s right, and the problem is the glamorous coating that began to stick to theoretical physics in the early 20th century (and has never completely flaked away)

Chad Orzel has a post up on the two halves of physics, and about how people tend to forget one of them: the experimentalists. I think he’s right, and the problem is the glamorous coating that began to stick to theoretical physics in the early 20th century (and has never completely flaked away). Several things led to that split: the startling predictions of relativity and quantum mechanics, borne out by experimentalists right down to the most unlikely-sounding results, for one.

Here’s a lab question for everyone. I have a bottle of Aldrich copper oxide nanopowder on my lab bench; I’ve been meaning to try it out for some Ullmann reactions. I note that Aldrich (and others) are now selling a variety of such nanopowders, mostly metals and insoluble metal compounds.

Here’s an excellent roundup of the Avastin story, referenced in an earlier post here . I have to say, I’ve been disappointed in some of the commentary on this issue (which that article goes into as well).

A Swiss newspaper reported over the weekend that Roche is planning large cuts, across much of their multinational organization. Here’s the original article , for those of you who read German

Well, so much for my fantasy of Sanofi-Aventis walking away from their attempt to buy Genzyme. They went public yesterday with a $69/share offer - even lower than most people were thinking - and just a little while ago, Genzyme publicly turned them down . What’s more, this is apparently the same price at which Genzyme (privately) balked earlier in the summer.

You always had to wonder how the move of appointing Sidney Wolfe to the Drugs Safety and Risks Management Committee at the FDA was going to work out. The signs of friction are appearing