Six degrees of drug design: Social science as infectious disease

If I can find any person on this planet within six 'steps', can I then find a new chemical entity also within six steps? What is the role of social sciences and the information explosion for answering this question? And most important, are there already bio/chem/drug/web2.0 examples showing some connections to the 'six degrees of drug design'?

This article is separated in three major parts. First I will give some examples of the effect of social networking discussing chemistry, drug design, healthcare, and medicine. Second, we will make a short excursion to group dynamics reciting Rich. And third, social networking is not uncritical and some pros/cons will be discussed. Drawbacks could be a social pressure and maybe even job problems, when violating intellectual properties.

Examples

• Salvinorin A (@Wikipedia, @totallysynthetic). Totallysynthetic blog is a medicinal chemistry blog with an active community. This example is highlighting a post with more than sixty comments discussing chemical synthesis challenges and ADME properties.
  
• Rosiglitazone/Avandia. In the pipeline is a drug design blog with topics ranging from medicinal chemistry, ADME/Tox, PK, drug design politics, medicinal trials, and even marketing issues. The Avandia post discussed on this blog is an interesting case, because the comments are nicely extending the original blog post. Here the comments and discussions help understanding the world around PPAR inhibitors (1,2,3). Derek was informed by his network about the latest Avandia news: 'reader Daniel H. has informed me that Roche seems to have stopped work on the compound in Phase II'. Beside this kind of network are there also scientific networks, which are covered by journal publications, e.g. this review.
  
  
• Hexacyclinol. This compound was heavily discussed in the blogosphere, because there were several problems associated with this molecule (1,2,3,4,5,6). A recent blog post published the results of a CASE expert system resolving parts of the conflict between two different hypothetical hexacyclinol structures.
  
• Healthcare strategy. One interesting effect of social networks is that the health of a single person might be improved by increasing first the health of persons in the social network of this person. I am not sure if this is now really an obesity drug marketing strategy, but this might indeed help people (1,2).
  
• Medicine. The ScienceRoll blog has pointed out several impacts of social software to medicine. The blog gives 10 tips of how web2.0 can impact medicine and how wikis can impact medicine.
  

Group dynamics
A classical group dynamics concept for smaller groups does maybe not apply to larger blogging or social networking communities. This is the reason why I will recite and comment some of Rich's points about blogging. Great job Rich!

1. The Undiscovered Continent of "Gray Literature." Like television networks, scientific journals serve subscribers with often wildly differing interests from yours. Some content will simply never make it into a print journal, no matter how useful or newsworthy. When you publish a blog, the only OK you need is your own. This means you can tackle subjects that are literally impossible for scientific journals to cover. In fact, your blog can contain valuable content not available anywhere else. After you wrap your brain around this simple concept, the most interesting things can start to happen.
   JKW: Agreed! This is one reason why I love mind mapping and literature management. And who has said that a good business can rely on scientific journals? I just say missing semantics in images (1,2), PDF articles, and blogs. Do not get me wrong, I know that several people in the bloggosphere are working on it heavily. I just would like to see more 'drug ontology' announcements like the recent Nature comment (original comment) and Elsevier study.
   

2. It takes about six months of constant writing to see signs of being noticed. This is the phase during which Rich suspect many bloggers throw in the towel. Unless you already enjoy world renown in your field (in which case you're probably not blogging), expect to pay your six month dues.
   

3. Syndication matters. A lot. When Rich started D-F, he couldn't understand why people seemed so excited about "syndication." But he did notice a steady build-up of traffic on my server logs dedicated solely to accessing his RSS and Atom feeds. He decided to track this traffic using FeedBurner and discovered, to his amazement, that it accounted for about a third of all non-robot traffic on my site.
   JKW comment: I personally appreciate 'passive feed-aggregation' over active eMail spamming. I prefer reading things when I am ready for it, not when another service things that I am ready. Furthermore can I apply additional filters with BlogBridge helping me in finding useful information.
   

4. Readers take the weekend off. Traffic drops off rather significantly (50-60%) on weekends. Conversely, traffic peaks quite consistently on Wednesdays. Although the former is understandable, the latter continues to puzzle me.
   JKW comment: This is exactly the same thing observed for other online-tools, e.g. LEO my favorite dictionary. Does this mean that you can make the best 'social networking' business on a Wednesday ?
   

5. For niche subjects, AdSense sucks. Chemistry is a subject dominated by niches. Any recent ACS program will show 40+ divisions; chemistry is all about the long tail. In the early days of D-F, Rich experimented with AdSense and got nada. This made sense (pun intended) because the ads being shown had almost nothing to do with what Rich was writing about. Adwords can work very well for broadly-appealing subjects. But if you're writing about your area of scientific expertise, which by definition is about as niche as you can get, AdSense is more likely to be an eyesore than a source of income.
   JKW comment: I never tried it, but I hate asdense spamming on sites, especially because many of them make pages almost unreadable.
   

6. Your most valuable asset: the archive. On a typical day, only about 15% of D-F's pageviews come from a user landing on the homepage itself. The rest come from pages previously found and linked to from other sources, bookmarks, or from search engines. When seen from this perspective, (which is hard to grasp when your archive contains ten articles) it becomes very important to maintain access to the archives and ensure that links can always be followed. On two occasions Rich has nearly hosed his database, but his backups saved the day. Never assume your archive of articles and comments will be there tomorrow.
   JKW comment: Statistics is a cude thing
   

7. You never know who's reading. The vast majority of readers never post a comment or write an email. Rich thinks he should have expected this, since the vast majority of blogs Rich reads never get a comment or email from him, too. On the other hand, Rich has met a few very intelligent and friendly people online as a direct result of one or more D-F articles, which is the ultimate reward.
   JKW comment: Agreed, made the same experience.
   

8. Writing begets more writing. Forcing yourself to write regularly about a subject you know about is very therapeutic. More importantly, being forced to back up your arguments in writing on a regular basis makes you examine your own assumptions more carefully. Most important of all, writing regularly brings new ideas into view that you would have missed otherwise.
   JKW comment: Again, this is another reason why I love it, too. There are many learning styles, but I (ab)use blogging also for learning new things. On the other hand, I can and will not blog about all the things I am interested in, so I have really to make choices.
   

9. Forget about getting Dugg, try to get StumbledUpon instead. Being a regular reader of Digg, Rich was well aware of its massive audience and the surge in traffic that follows a site being featured on the Digg home page. The effect usually lasts a couple of days. But the traffic surge produced from a listing in StumbleUpon, continues unabated for weeks, and results in permanently higher overall page views.
   JKW comment: I recommended D-T first on StumbleUpon, but I could not found you as user.
   

10. Robots everywhere. Google Analytics doesn't record activity from robots and web spiders. But my server log reveals a staggering amount of traffic due to non-human visitors. The software interacting with my site is doing everything from indexing it for Google to trying to post annoying ringtone spam comments. Still, the benefit of automated user agents more than outweighs the inconvenience. Make sure your robots.txt file allows any and all user agents.

Cons of social networking

1. Blocking job opportunities. An example with bad taste and social blaming character is the story of a job seeker, for which the details have been published as a forbes comment. This highlights one thing, do not publish, if you can not handle it. This case is even worse, because the job seeker had no plans publishing to a wide audience. This is a classical news leak example, and a mobbing example, too.
   

   Younger employees, often devotees on MySpace and reality TV, are predisposed to online missteps in the workplace, says Castellini. "Voyeurism is an aspect of their lives," he says, "and they don't understand the ramifications of it." [forbes]
   

2. Job loss by violating confidentiality. Please ensure that you are not abusing intellectual properties, privacy laws, trust, and customer-client confidentiality. Otherwise you might get into serious problems, which might be avoided by following some basic rules:
   
   • Outweigh problems and benefits of blogging
   • Check your employment contract and make sure there is no conflict of interest
   • Do not use employer's equipment for blogging, unless you have explicit permisson. Alone this might cause getting fired, even without checking the question if your networking has violated company content.
   • Ensure that your blog is not tied to your employer.
   • Ensure that your posts are confirmed, legal, and correct.
     
3. Burden of blogging. I personally enjoy the post on lamentations on chemistry

   One of the fun ”burdens” of blogging is the constant pressure to write new posts with new content. Since I am not Jacques-Yves Cousteau or Henry Kissinger, I have to thrash around for ideas that are compelling yet not in conflict with confidentiality issues related to my career. I have much to say about many fascinating chemistries in diverse industries that, owing to confidentiality, I’ll have to take to the grave. No doubt there are many other bloggers out there who are in the same pickle.
   

Pros of social networking

1. Innovation. I personally believe that keeping networking on several levels will help identifying innovation. This is crucial, because innovation will not fall from the sky, even if people are 'thinking outside a box'. The crucial part is to know what is already covered by the box, and for that social networking is a great information source.
   
2. Specific information source. Blogs can help making the information world smaller and less chaotic. This might help finding experienced friends in the information space, especially drug space. For kinase chemistry a very good example is the KinasePro blog. Anyway, this effect is confirmed by a study in China published by Prof. Rebecca MacKinnon
   
   • 90 percent of those interviewed follow blogs, and answered “yes” to the question: “For the purposes of work, do you or your staff ever read blogs written from or about China – either in Chinese or another language?”.
   • Most respondents find blogs useful for story ideas and information
   • Most find blogs useful to spot emerging stories and as a general source of story ideas.
3. Finding a job: Employers often check out potential hires on social networking sites, so beware that they might really check all of your provided information.

References

• Six degrees of separation, @Wikipedia
• J. R. Scheerer, J. F. Lawrence, G. C. Wang, D. A. Evans,
  Asymmetric Synthesis of Salvinorin A, A Potent Opioid Receptor Agonist,
  J. Am. Chem. Soc., 129, 2007, 8968-8969. DOI 10.1021/ja073590a
• 'Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything', @Wikipedia
• K. R. Guertin, J. Grimsby,
  Small molecule glucokinase activators as glucose lowering agents: a new paradigm for diabetes therapy.
  Curr Med Chem., 13, 2006, 1839-1843. PMID 16787225
  
• Rosiglitazone: InChI=1/C18H19N3O3S/c1-21(16-4-2-3-9-19-16)10-11-24-14-7-5-13(6-8-14)12-15-17(22)20-18(23)25-15/h2-9,15H,10-12H2,1H3,(H,20,22,23)/f/h20H
• Salvinorin A: InChI=1/C23H28O8/c1-12(24)30-16-9-15(20(26)28-4)22(2)7-5-14-21(27)31-17(13-6-8-29-11-13)10-23(14,3)19(22)18(16)25/h6,8,11,14-17,19H,5,7,9-10H2,1-4H3/t14-,15-,16-,17-,19-,22-,23-/m0/s1