I
believe Stu Borman was the first to cover the Division of Medicinal
Chemistry’s First Time Disclosures symposium for C&EN, but it was
Carmen Drahl who began the
practice of hand-drawing and tweeting the clinical candidates as they
were disclosed in real time. This seems like an oddball practice to
folks who aren’t at the meeting. Why not just take a picture of the
relevant slide? Well, that’s against the rules: There
are signs all over the ACS National Meeting stating that photos, video,
and audio recording of presentations are strictly prohibited. In San
Francisco, symposium organizer Jacob Schwarz repeatedly reminded
attendees that this was the case. Carmen’s brilliant
idea to get around this rule was to simply draw the structures as they
were presented, snap a photo, and then tweet it out.
I’ve
inherited the task since Carmen left the magazine a couple of years
ago. I find it incredibly stressful. For an even that’s billed as a
disclosure, the actual
disclosing is fairly fleeting. The structures are often not on the
screen for very long, and I’m never confident that I’ve got it 100%
right. Last year in San Diego I tweeted out one structure and I heard
the following day from Anthony Melvin Crasto, a chemist
in India, that based on the patent literature he thought I had an atom
wrong. I was certain that I had written this structure correctly, so I
contacted the presenting scientist. He had disclosed the wrong
structure!
I
agree that there should be some sort of database established
afterwards, and I think you all have done great work on that front. I
think you’ll find the pharmaceutical
companies reluctant to help you out in any way. They guard these
compounds so fiercely that it often makes we wonder why we have this
symposium to begin with.