Come on now. Stand by your past statements or publicly change your mind. But don’t try to pretend.
Medicinal chemist / chemical biologist, author of “In the Pipeline” at http://science.org/blogs/pipeline. derekb.lowe@gmail.com and on Signal at Dblowe.18 All opinions are mine; I don’t speak for my employer in any way.
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Come on now. Stand by your past statements or publicly change your mind. But don’t try to pretend.
“Hardy hibiscus”, which are horticultural hybrids of several H. species. These live in a big pot, and every year I wonder if they’re even alive because they don’t even send up stems (with maple-like leaves) until like June. I take them into the garage for the winter- “hardy” is a relative term.
Four o’clock flowers (Mirabilis jalapa), an old-fashioned flowering annual. I hadn’t realized that it forms a tuber, but this one is in its third year after being lifted in the fall and stored in a paper bag each winter. It’s bigger every year! The hummingbirds are big fans.
More cosmos “Gazebo” flowers this morning.
Today is a great day to donate to wikipedia. Tomorrow works too. donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ways_to...
What will be the deranged reason given for this idiotic move? That they might recommend vaccine research or something? RFK Jr. must be removed from office. It’s him or us.
A couple of rarities from an old passport of mine. Border crossings for East Germany on a drive to West Berlin, and a visa for the People’s Republic of Hungary, obtained in Vienna before a trip down the Danube to Budapest. Both in Spring 1989.
The new CDC director is trying to kill you. Not just “the most vulnerable”; you, me, everyone. This is a comic book-level evil scenario.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with: “What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”
Tuberous begonia “Samba”
Dahlia “Cornel” before opening and in full bloom.
Breaking News: Read three top CDC officials' resignation emails. The end of an era. insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-n...
Well, this is horrifyingly bad. RFK Jr. and these tools of his science-free health project need to be out.
I can well believe it. When I was younger I would get worked up about watching people throw money away like this, but now I just watch from the far end of the table like an anthropologist or something.
Truly. I only play blackjack (basic strategy with a simple card count on top of it). But there are places that only pay out a blackjack at 6:5, and I’m not touching that. Mind you, most customers play as if they’re lurching drunk even while completely sober, so these are fine distinctions. . .
Not sure! But I fear it’s “Zero pays no bets and there are four of them, you losers”
You’ll be pleased to hear that at least one casino out there is trialing roulette tables with *four* zeros on the wheel. A 10% house edge, like feeding money into a paper shredder.
It’s crazy that America just like. Destroyed science. Just looked at its golden goose and went “wow should we kill this? And not for the gold, but just because we fucking hate this thing” And if you tell random people about it they go “no, that doesn’t seem true” and just refuse to believe you
I have never seen so many public servants protest the mismanagement of a government. Trumpists will point to this as proof of the deep state, but the reality is that these are professionals who are desperately trying to get the public to understand how bad things are.
AND NOW THE SENIOR CDC LEADERS HAVE JOINED THE WALK OUT! www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ7Q...
Special Report Inside the CDC director’s ouster: Kennedy demanded acceptance of new vaccine policies; Susan Monarez refused www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...
I think people really struggle w partially consolidated authoritarianism, either understating our problem or understating our power It's like we're in a liminal fascist space. And not recognizing how far gone we are or thinking we're simply too far gone are both grave errors we can't afford to make
Breaking: BILL CASSIDY is calling for CDC's vaccine advisers meeting to be postponed. "If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership."
However bad you think things are at the CDC they are worse. That's the takeaway from this well-reported story from Daniel Payne w/back-up from an all-star STAT team. Must-read. www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...
Posting this story on Dem Mayors' effort to form a united front against Trump's invasions, bc it's the kind of story people will miss and then claim Dems never attempted to form a united front. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...
RFK Jr. is an outright danger to this country, and he should resign or be fired. Do we still have the sort of government that does such things? Or have we turned into. . . that other kind. You know the one.
As someone who’s had two basal cell carcinomas removed surgically , I endorse this message. Visit a dermatologist!
I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
REMINDER: in this moment, the thing you want your Congressperson to do is (1) demand resignations and (2) threaten endless hearings. Impeachment isn't going to work. Read the article if you don't want to take my word for it - Larry is the most respected health law expert in America.
House Democrats could force a vote on impeaching RFK any time they want. Of course it would fail. But do you want to make an issue of it or not?
The CDC is in chaos. If you’re a current employee and would like to share information anonymously, please reach out via Signal: emullin.06 www.wired.com/story/center...
It sure do. And by gosh that similarity is more than a mere coincidence.
I think it shows the power of the Suzuki reaction - in 90% of cases you can get a serviceable yield from an almost random selection of solvent, carbonate base and ligand
What I mean when I describe him as “utterly unfit”, part 17,468:
And this, folks, is one reason why the synthetic organic chemistry literature is not in very good shape for machine learning!
This is the stuff. Not just expressing concern or requesting a dialogue. But rather calling for RFK Jr. to be thrown out of an office that he is utterly unfit to hold, before he kills more innocent people.
Abbe Lowell and I represent CDC Director #SusanMonarez. Contrary to govt statements, Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor yet been fired. She will not resign. We have issued the following statement:
Update: At least three other high-ranking officials in CDC have also resigned. “I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health,” one of the officials said in a note to staff.
every bit of HHS-related news is worse than what preceded it
“Scaling up like this” refers to the content of the link, which is about the complications of large-scale synthetic organic chemistry.
Rotovap or rotavap? #chemsky
You’re not dropping a single, asshole. If you’re actually knew anything, it would be criminal not to reveal it now. But of course, this is a bullshit publicity stunt.
I once made a calculation mistake at 2000 gallon scale; I got saved by the operator, who called me. Bought that man a case of beer.
Oh, any chemist who doesn’t respect scale-up complexity is heading for a painful awakening.
I'm not sure Americans have a frame of reference for the sort of gangster government we have now. Any objective functions it performs are an afterthought. The law only used as a tool to punish political enemies and ignored in every other instance
Not how this country is supposed to work. And here’s hoping that this gasbag gets this point explained to him, by whatever means will do the job.
First time I came across a real anti-vaxxer was about 1991, and I felt that I was interacting with a fringe relic of a bygone era. Sigh.
Nor anyone else!
Also, me reading 891 books and taking 2 years to write a book on the complex and esoteric history of cancer chemotherapy just so I can shove it up a bunch of trolls who, every day, moan “but chemo is all mustard gas so boycott it” is the most on-brand thing I can ever do
Read this thing and asked, could I have possibly made the colossally trivial statement "The numbers speak for themselves"? Well, yes, I actually did. I'm so quotable. www.masslive.com/news/2025/08...
Scaling up like this takes attention to every little detail, and a willingness to question your typical assumptions. Not everyone is capable of it!
Generative AI and off-the-shelf computational tools can make the synthesis and use of nerve agents for nefarious purposes more probable. "The Sarin shortcut: How AI lowers the bar for chemical weapons," by @ashjogalekar.bsky.social. ⬇️
I have nothing bad to say about the pizzas of NJ. Meanwhile Eastern MA does have some really good ones, but you do have to tread carefully. That’s partly due to the prevalence of Greek-style pizza joints, which are their own thing.
This argument will never of course be settled, but the New Haven area is very, very solid pizza.
From NPR: When pressed ... [Trump] hedged, saying he may or may not send in federal troops to Chicago. "I didn't get a request from the governor... And I think until I get that request from that guy, I'm not going to do anything about it."
I highly recommend folks go out and get a covid vaccine ASAP.
The administration isn’t just taking vaccines away. They aren’t responding to outbreaks. They are not preventing disease. They are enabling it. Essential reading from @amymaxmen.bsky.social. kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
A closer look at lithium orotate, after that lithium-Alzheimer’s paper. It has a complex history!
If you, like me, are still trying to put last week's complex SCOTUS decision on NIH funding into context, this great story by my colleagues is a great resource 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Perfectly normal and OK. Right? Hey Albert Bourla and all the other biopharma CEOs who have been trying to butter these people up: how goes it? You liking what you see, from Trump and from RFK, Jr.?
The prolonged public torturing of a single man because the state cannot admit to its errors is not something that occurs in a free country
Some notes, from an airport, on this dumb performative decision, which is calculated to appeal to vapid totalitarian twats. /1 www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
I don’t know what else to say.
The sheer amount of time, money, and resources this government has spent to torture one random guy is astounding.
Haven’t come across those before!
They’ve been showing up in the last few years, de-husked and sold as “golden berries”.
Very much looks like a “cicada killer” at work. I saw one take a cicada out of the air in mid-flight right in front of me a few years ago, and it was like an air-to-air missile attack (!)
Replenishing those mitochondria, a vital task that cats never neglect.
Picotee tuberous begonia. The male flowers are the two larger ones. These spend the winter as bare tubers in a bag of wood shavings in the garage.
Tying a drug candidate structure around into a macrocycle is real work: so why bother doing for things like kinase inhibitors?
I've grown that picotee type as well, but they never reseeded for me, so I didn't see this effect. But I think it's found in a lot of Ipomoea varieties - the recessive traits that give them the neat forms and coloration gradually get submerged over the generations.
Frieze, Fulton County Dept. of Health and Wellness, Atlanta, Georgia. They don't decorate public buildings the way they used to. It makes me feel better already. Go get 'em doc. Not today Death, not today.
Wild to see an JAMA article from 1925 titled "What Constitutes a Satisfactory Drug?" is not too different than if someone were to write such an article today (with the exception of a final possessive determiner): jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... #chemsky ⚗️🧪
I’m looking forward to reading this
Sometimes the sheer idiocy of this moment overwhelms me. The idea that our convicted felon POTUS who incited an attack on DC police then pardoned the attackers & who's the most corrupt official in US history is going on an "anti-crime" ride-along in a city w/falling crime rate is...(brain explodes)
Interesting! I’ve been wondering about the mechanism here, but I presume that there can be more than one way for this to happen.
TL;DR: 5 justices say Trump doesn't have to immediately restore the funding, but 5 *also* signal that the underlying directives are unlawful. That sends a fairly strong (if mixed) message that Trump will lose these cases *eventually,* but only once they're brought in the Court of Federal Claims.
Just how hard can you push cells to make proteins that they don’t need to make?
We are seeing the death of American biomedicine happening right before our eyes. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget is the culprit. www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/ni...
I’ve seen both blow up. . .
If I had all the money in the world, I would commission a 5000 word piece on David Collum and the weird, bad places he's gone to.
RFK Jr., Hegseth and Duffy are doing performative public workouts instead of their actual jobs and, what's even more pathetic, they are not remotely good at working out.
And now they’re blooming in this year’s generation - have a look! Overall they’re reverting to the wild-type, it seems.
As morning glories will, they reseeded, so I’ve had them every year, growing among the tomatoes without any need for me to replant. But the flowers themselves were getting more pale. Here’s 2021:
Eight years ago I planted “Carnivale de Venezia” morning glories in a pot in the greenhouse. Here they are from the seed packet (2017 shot)
For non-US authors - you can just leave the state part of the form blank & it still seems to go through. The eligibility issue is whether your book is registered with US copyright, not your residency/citizenship
Grrrr. We don't call protein phosphorylation or acteylation epiproteomics. So let's not call RNA modification epitranscriptomics. In fact, realisitically, epigenetics has so many definitions, some of them non-overlapping, that this whole epi-XXXX (genetics/genomics whatever) is just not helping us.
I wish all of the clinical failures could be blamed on this, because that would be easier to fix. But in my experience a lot of them are based on the best knowledge available - which still isn’t good enough.
That hit me when the first project I worked on (starting back in 1989) failed in the clinic a while later. It was a really good candidate - very potent and selective, good PK, no tox findings. And it did nothing. "Well, there goes that hypothesis", I thought. . .
These are the sorts of attacks on experts that resulted in a domestic terrorist firing 500 shots at the CDC just over a week ago. If you stand for evidence based public health interventions, you basically get a target placed on your back by DHHS leadership. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
Dahlia “Cornel” opening. It has taken effort to keep the groundhogs from eating every one of the dahlias back to the dirt, because they are clearly unspeakably delicious.
It sureis! I just reminded myself that this might be my last shot before the year 2040.
18” Dobsonian. Not a “planetary scope” by any means, but aperture makes up for a lot!
Most are quite surprised! Most people outside the biomedical fields aren't aware of how little we understand the molecular workings of health and disease, so "Whoops, we must have picked the wrong target!" and "Whoops, turns out that does something else!" are unexpected phenomena for them.
Oh for sure - I've worked on so many projects that never got into human trials at all. . .
85% of all drug candidates that go into human trials fail. Expensively. This is the central fact of the entire research pharma industry.
If you’re in Washington, DC and are impacted by or responding to the surge of federal agents in the city, I’d love to speak with you. I’m at mebrown@ap.org and mrbrownsir.98 on Signal.
