Geoffrey Wilkinson first reported his famous work on the hydrogenation catalyst that now bears his name in 1965[cite]10.1039/C19650000131[/cite] and I met him at Imperial College around 1969 and again when I returned there in 1977.

First, a very brief history of scholarly publishing, starting in 1665[cite]10.1098/rstl.1665.0001[/cite] when scientific journals started to be published by learned societies.

Zosurabalbin[cite]10.1038/s41586-023-06873-0[/cite],[cite]10.1093/ofid/ofad500.1754[/cite], is receiving a great deal of attention as a new class of antibiotic which can target infections for which current treatment options are inadequate.

2023 has been a long year in which a lot happens. Two EU projects ended (RiskGONE and NanoSolveIT; more about that in a later post), our group leader Chris Evelo will retire this year, the ELIXIR Toxicology Community started (see this post), the new WikiPathways website launched (see this post), and a lot, lot more.

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote that “traditional physical organic chemistry is barely practiced today,” which attracted some controversy on X. Here are some responses: “POC has evolved in many directions and its concepts are widely used, e.g., in host-guest chem, org syn, materials sci, drug discovery.” - Bill Jorgensen “There is still a lot of absolutely gorgeous classical phys org done with organometallic and enzymatic reactions.

In this post, I’m trying something new and embedding calculations on Rowan alongside the text. You can view the structures and energies right in the page, or you can follow a link and view the full data in a new tab.

(Previously: 2022) #1. Tony Fadell, Build #2. Giff Constable, Talking To Humans #3. Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Doing Hard Things #4. Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends And Influence People Sounds Machiavellian, but actually quite wholesome: a “dad book,” as my friend

I will approach this example of a molecule-of-the-year candidate – in fact the eventual winner in the reader poll – from the point of view of data.

The Science education unit at the ACS publication C&EN publishes its list of molecules of the year (as selected by the editors and voted upon by the readers) in December. Here are some observations about three of this year’s batch.

Around 1996, journals started publishing what became known as “ESI” or electronic supporting information, alongside the articles themselves, as a mechanism for exposing the data associated with the research being reported and exploiting some of the new opportunities offered by the World Wide Web. From the outset, such ESI was expressed as a paginated Acrobat file, with the Web being merely a convenient document delivery mechanism.