The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad to announce the birth of my new project: The Euchromatic Blog.

As you can see, it is just an “under construction” page, at the moment, but I have obviously many ideas and projects for how it is going to look like once it will actually be in business. I would say it already exists in my mind. In fact, I am able to describe how it will be.

Right from the title, you can easily understand it won’t be a pharma chem thing, but don’t be fooled: it will not just be a molecular biology blog, but a proper scientific blog. So, in a nutshell, don’t think that it will be just western blots and micro arrays.
The idea is to take inspiration from the most successful and popular chemical blogs out there (Carbon-based Curiosities, The Chem Blog, Totally Synthetic and, why not, the Outrageous On-Line Uncle Al), mix them all, incubate over night at 37°C in culture medium (10% foetal calf serum) and see what happens.
Sure, if you have liked my pharmacology posts, you’ll find some of them, but the days of the “Saturday Night Synthesis”, I’m afraid, are dead and gone. (If anyone wants to start the series on their blog, feel free to do it: there’s no copyright involved, just give me credit for the idea).

One of the key words of the Euchromatic Blog will be “relax”: this must be a nice place to be, not a hall for lecturing readers. Thus, science will be discussed in a relaxed and colloquial way: radically different from how I’ve done here, especially in the beginning.
However, unlike this half-decent blog that I still like a lot, there will be many more real-world, bench stories from the lab. And much more personal stuff too

This very blog will get more personal too: not only will I advertise the new project, but a lot of attention is also to be given to me graduating and leaving this city and country.

Don’t worry, though: the end of this blog might have been scheduled, but the strength of its voice is far from gone.

Following last week’s massive news, this is the right time to turn into reality an idea that came to me almost a year ago. You see, this blog has been tremendously fun to write and  I genuinely believe it has perfectly represented me as an undergraduate who studies pharmaceutical chemistry. However, those days are about to end, as my entrance in the eerie world of graduate studies will take place in October and, moreover, pharmaceutical science isn’t going to play the part in my life it used to. Therefore, a blog which clearly points at pharmacy as its main theme will suddenly get meaningless.

So, I have decided to close this blog in July, a couple of days after graduation. But this doesn’t mean at all I will leave the scientific Blogosphere.

One of the most important things I have realised in these two years is that I really like to have a place where I can literally throw my thoughts in and, amazingly, people can come and leave their opinions, safe in the knowledge I will never censor them (unless they are rotten spammers).
What’s more, I love what We are doing with our blogs (and by “We” I mean only scientific bloggers: I hate people who set up blogs just to talk about their useless and miserable lives). We can really make science entertaining and enjoyable. We are already making the difference, changing the way science is discussed. We have ideas! We are the Future! We CAN!
Ehm, well, elections are about to come here in Italy (and somewhere else): I might have been influenced and exaggerated a bit…

Still, I do believe scientific blogs are great opportunities and I want to remain part of this community for many years. I just feel I need something different, something in which I can find myself fully represented for the years to come: that’s why this blog will be closed and I will move one, to a new project (and, hopefully, a higher quality level).

To sum up, I will keep writing here, as there are good things left to be written. Then, once no longer a pharmaceutical chemist, I’ll close it.
Meanwhile, I will work at my new blog, which will formally open in September (can’t provide a date at the moment) but be (pompously) unveiled next week.

Thank you for reading this blog: I hope (and actually believe) you will like what I’ve planned for the future.

Apparently, if you want your blog to be famous and successful, you need animals. Honestly, I can remember where and when chemists began to like kittens. I don’t know who is to blamed for putting pictures of them in their posts. Thing is, he or she was a genius and, perhaps indirectly, found the secret to make a blog popular. Kittens, however, aren’t the only animals bloggers write about: unsurprisingly, mice are featured too. I have never had a pet, although I have always thought that if I were to choose one, I would pick a dog. But I would never do such a stupid thing as having to look after an animal while being a student: that’s something you do when you’re older and your children endlessly ask you to buy a little, cute and little pet for Christmas, that will eventually turn into a wild beast within a couple of years (and by that time your now-teenager heirs will have lost any interest in it).
My cousin has pretty much the same opinion on this problem but, apparently, his flat mate is very mean and bought him two goldfishes. He liked the idea so much he decided not to instantly murder them, choosing, perhaps, a gory method, but started, despite their incredibly mediocre IQ, to responsibly treat them as proper pets.
Predictably enough, when he went away for Christmas I was kindly asked to take care of them, feeding and changing the water regularly and so on. I thought it was my turn to let animals creep into my usual endless descriptions of drugs, diseases and syntheses. At least they gave me the inspiration for this post.

The water in the picture above is clearly dirty and needs to be changed. But this operation can’t be repeated too frequently or the fishes die (I was told so by a wise man, who always knows best). That gave me an idea: what about adding phenol red to the water, like we do with cells. I mean, just by looking at the colour of your flask, you can tell when you’ll have to split them because already confluent and, moreover, in a medium too acid (because of metabolic waste products, dead cells, debris, etc.) and lacking nutrients.
An aquarium which turns yellowish, would clearly indicate the goldfish are swimming in a not ideal environment. And don’t think the idea of using it on organisms other than cells is weird and mad: in the past, your physician might have injected a solution of phenol red in your veins, so that it reaches the kidneys, gets eliminated in the urine and you can perform a colorimetric titration to assay the filtering efficiency of your kidney.
It’s not that pointless to administer phenol red in goldfishes, either: back in 1970s, this seems to have been something scientists were keen to do.

And it’s not pointless, above all, to feature this theme here because, although I’ll never waste my money on cheap phenol red to see what happens, next year, I want to win the “Most Awesome Blog” awards. So I need pets…

First answer to a fundamental question. Surprised?

It’s good to be back! Even if that implies that my summer holidays are over, this doesn’t necessarily mean that my fun will cease. Given that I won’t begin to work at my graduation thesis before December (or the very end of November), I can manage to spend a lot of splendid weekends while I pretend to work hard at the chemist’s I chose for my awfully useless internship the rest of the time…

Then I’ll enjoy myself even more, in my opinion, as I’ll be have the opportunity to do precisely what I want: molecular biology. That’s hardcore stuff, baby!

So, now you’re probably wondering what topics this blog will deal with on this second year of life. Haven’t you spent your entire holidays annoying your friends with your predictions on this issue?
Well, now your questions are to be answered.

We begin with “At the chemist’s”, a series of posts which describe how I spend my days at the moment and how an Italian, country chemist’s shop looks like.

On October 20, “Saturday Night Synthesis” will be finally back and restyled with much more things to garnish the synthesis itself! As you should expect every (half) decent Saturday Night show to do: noisy and glittery.

Next month molecular biology will make its proper, grand entrance (after a short introduction I gave you with a couple of posts: do you remember?).
I’ll start with some theory (hopefully not boring “lectures” but amazing facts) before the main course: “I wanna be a molecular biologist” (title may change). Yes, starting in December, you’ll know everything about my thesis, through frequent updates on the work in progress. No one has ever done this before, and even if someone actually did, I don’t care, because I’ll be much better at it!

Oh, and I’ve also some interesting projects for posts about glass and drug-delivery systems…

Moreover, this being a Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog, there’ll still be drugs popping around every so often.

So, I am pretty confident this season will be even better than the first one.

That’s all for today, lads: I’ve to finish unpacking, to transfer holiday pictures on my crappy PC and my iTunes library needs to be updated. Busy night as usual.

Seeya!