“Part of the reason drug discovery can be challenging to physicists is because they are steeped in a culture of reductionism. Reductionism is the great legacy of twentieth-century physics, but while it worked spectacularly well for particle physics it doesn’t quite work for drug design. A physicist may see the human body or even a protein-drug system as a complex machine whose understandings we can completely understand once we break it down into its constituent parts. But the chemical and biological systems that drug discoverers deal with are classic examples of emergent phenomena. A network of proteins displays properties that are not obvious from the behavior of the individual proteins…Reductionism certainly doesn’t work in drug discovery in practice since the systems are so horrendously complicated, but it may not even work in principle. hysicists need to understand that drug discovery presents reductionism in a straitjacket; it can help you a little bit at every level, but it has very little wiggle room beyond that level.”
— Jogalekar, Ash. “Why it’s hard to explain drug discovery to physicists.” The Curious Wavefunction. 4 March 2012. Web. 4 Jun. 2012 [source]
Notes
-
quitesciencey reblogged this from thenoobyorker
-
ubernutella likes this
-
azaadi likes this
-
buzzlightyearsu likes this
-
ridetherithum likes this
-
thenoobyorker posted this
