“The statistican George Box once memorably quipped, all models are wrong, but some are useful. It is chemical intuition that can separate the good models from the bad ones.”
“This industry (Pfizer) historically has spent anywhere from 15% to 20% of top-line sales in R&D,” LaMattina told Reuters. “It’s their lifeblood. If you don’t have new products you don’t have a business anymore.” Added LaMattina: “In the short term, I guess that’s OK in terms of delivering for shareholders. But four, five, 10 years out, I’m not sure that is going to be a very good position to be in.”
Finally (By Wavefunction on Sunday, July 17, 2011):
1. Don’t ignore the obvious: One of the most striking features of chemistry as a science is that very palpable properties like color, smell, taste and elemental state are directly connected to molecular structure. There is an unforgettably direct connection between the smell of cis-3-hexenol and that of freshly cut grass. Once you smell both independently it is virtually impossible to forget the connection. Chemists who are known for their intuition never lose sight of these simple molecular properties, and they use them as disarming filters that can cut through the complex calculations and the multimillion dollar chemical analysis.
2. Get a feel for energetics: The essence of chemistry can be boiled down to a fight unto death of countless factors that rally either for or against the free energy of a system. When you are designing molecules as anticancer agents, for hydrogen storage or solar energy conversion or as enzyme mimics, ultimately what decides whether they will work or not is energetics, how well they can stabilize and be stabilized and ultimately lower the free energy of the system. Intimate familiarity with numbers can help in these cases. Get a feel for the rough contributions made by hydrogen bonds, electrostatics, steric interactions and solvent influences. This is especially important for chemists working at the interface of chemistry and biology; remember, life is a game played within a 3 kcal/mol window and any insight that allows you to nail down numbers within this window can only help. The same goes for some other parameters like Van der Waals radii and bond lengths. Linus Pauling was lying in bed with a cold when he managed to build accurate models of the protein alpha helix, largely based on his unmatched feel for such numbers.
3. Stay in touch with the basics, and learn from other fields: This is a lesson that is often iterated but seldom practiced. An old professor of mine used to recommend flipping open an elementary chemistry textbook every day to a random page and reading ten pages from it. Sometimes our research becomes so specialized and we become so enamored of our little corner of the chemical world that we forget the big picture. Part of the lessons cited above simply involve not missing the forest for the trees and always thinking of basic principles of structure and reactivity in the bigger sense.
