The Bond Breaker
Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 13:07
in Physics & Chemistry
Why are there so many diseases and so few cures? It’s not just that medicine moves slowly; chemistry holds us back, too. To build drugs, chemists start with a base molecule, then add and subtract atoms from it one by one in a sequence of reactions. The process is tedious and wasteful—a 10-step reaction might convert only 8 percent of the starting material into the right end product. And that’s if chemists can make the drug at all. read more