The Fall 2008 ACS meeting ends

It is always nice for a major conference to happen on home turf. Last week the American Chemical Society held its fall meeting in Philadelphia.

I finally got to meet my Second Life collaborator Andrew Lang during our first talk on Monday August 18, 2008. We presented on what is now possible to do for chemistry in Second Life. There are now several easy to use tools for chemistry and molecular biology. For example, Andy has created a tool to display protein surfaces using a lightweight sculpted prim from a PDB file. Take a look at the slides from the presentation for a quick overview.


I gave another talk on Monday about Second Life and Social Media: Networking Goldmine or Time Sink? It was a nice opportunity for me to talk about major success stories (Bora Zivkovic, Beth Ritter-Guth and Deepak Singh) as well as specific examples from my own experience. Sandy Adam from Sigma-Aldrich and Andy Lang contributed their own stories at the end. The take home message was that if you treat these platforms as a means of participating with your scientific community you're likely to get out of it more than you put in.

On Wednesday I spoke about Open Notebook Science and the value of raw data in drug discovery. The timing was perfect, since I had just finished analyzing the correlation of our docking predictions with biological assays against falcipain-2 and Plasmodium falciparum. (data here)