Table of Contents

It’s nearly Halloween, and in the spirit of the season, Nancy McGuire, our associate editor, brings you two articles to go with your cider and candy corn. In Touring the Net, she brings you the latest in Web sites on potions and other accoutrements to make your celebration complete. On the scarier side, she reviews a book on voodoo science. What some people believe in the name of science will truly curl your intestines.

Frightening circumstances prevail everywhere in our world. One example is the stuff people dump in bodies of water. In the first article in our new department, Chemscripts, Gáspár Bánfalvi describes a simple and elegant way to remove cyanide from wastewater. As he says, cyanide from ore-extracting plants is a rampant problem in European rivers. In the United States, we don’t expect this kind of nonsense to happen any more, but it’s a real issue elsewhere. So we’re happy to spread the word, not only about the problem, but also the solution.

Now for something even more serious—and personal. One of the toughest challenges facing the biomedical, and therefore the chemical, community is the prevention and cure of diseases of the brain. Among these, Alzheimer’s disease, virtually unknown as little as 40 years ago, is becoming the scourge of people who are living longer thanks to other advances in fighting illnesses. My mother-in-law began to show signs of Alzheimer’s several years ago, was eventually diagnosed, and, despite the use of currently available drugs, has very little cognition and a greatly diminished quality of life in general.

So when Chemical Innovation received a manuscript this summer from Jaan Pesti of DuPont Pharmaceuticals, my attention was immediately captured. Whether or not the candidate drug Pesti and his co-authors describe turns out to be a satisfactory treatment for Alzheimer’s, the process they used to develop the drug, and the pitfalls they had to overcome, make fascinating reading. I think it’s a wonder that DuPont management even permitted such a revealing account of the company’s internal workings to be published, but I’m grateful that they did. As a pharmaceutical R&D outsider, what I learned that was most significant is the importance of the development work that comes between the establishment of an efficacious active ingredient and a product that’s ready for formulation. There’s a lot of drug-company bashing going on in politics these days, but the reality is that new drugs are expensive to develop and test.

Cyberchemistry

In yet another way, it’s scary that two of the five Chemical Innovation feature articles this month deal with tools that enable the chemistry professional to do his or her job better by using the computer. Even though these articles are in our Succeeding in the Marketplace section, they could well be dubbed Succeeding in the Laboratory or Succeeding in the Office. “Things are sure different from the way they used to was,” as an old office mate of mine was fond of saying.

How do we visualize the structure of a complex molecule? Old way: A Fieser triangle, clunky ball-and-stick models, or a gifted departmental graphic artist. New way: Sophisticated molecular modeling programs, as described by Katriona Knapman of Molecular Simulations Inc. In this, Knapman’s second piece for us, she describes the newly available software that runs on PCs. Sorry, UNIX.

How do we find the key synthetic step that will make our complex route to the next blockbuster pharmaceutical succeed? Old way: Wrestling with huge volumes of Chemical Abstracts, breaking their backs (and ours) while making photocopies, and generally taking all day in the library to eke out a few pertinent references. New way: Our Chemical Abstracts Service colleagues Kirk Schwall and Kurt Zielenbach detail the five-year history of SciFinder. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to touch a single piece of paper while locating every shred of information in the chemical literature that is pertinent to the substance or reaction of interest.

Of course, as the TV flacks say, there’s much, much more! in this issue. So don’t be afraid to dig in. And of course, you can access the new Chemical Innovation online version and scare yourself all over again.