Simulations Plus

In a podcast called Thinking About Thinking, three eminent scientists discuss the ways humans think. All three have interesting and useful insights. I recommend this podcast to anyone responsible for managing Pharma R&D teams or for anyone looking for new ways to improve team performance, especially in knowledge-intensive research efforts.

George Steiner:

Our world is shrinking. Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. How can we claim to speak of human consciousness if we overlook what is most daring and imaginative? I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Frances Fukuyama had some interesting things to say in the current issue of Foreign Affairs about the implications of globalization and technical innovation for our children’s future.*

I know, I know — you don’t want to read another doom and gloom blog. But, in a recent article in the National Review* (link is no longer available), Peter Thiel does an excellent job of linking the desperate necessity of advancements in technology and science with the broader societal crises we are now experiencing. Thiel posits that there is a mistaken, but nearly universal, background assumption about easy progress that underlies our unwillingness to tackle difficult problems.

Back in 1974, Stewart Brand’s advice was to “stay hungry, stay foolish,” as a way of bringing a beginner’s mind to new challenges. He still follows that advice, and he now says, “The phrase allows you to open your mind and explore. It means putting aside the explanations provided by social constructs and ideologies.”

Chapter 3 of 3. Need to catch up? Read the previous post in this series about scientific workflows.

In the same way that the guillotine concentrates the senses, the need to improve productivity in the pharmaceutical industry has become a life-or-death imperative. Improving productivity does not mean working harder and faster while doing the same job as before. Improving productivity lies in innovation—in the technology and processes that clever minds bring into existence. Moreover, what this innovation must accomplish is vividly clear. We must reduce the time and cost of drug development; increase the probability of successful experiments; and bring better drugs to the marketplace.

Answer: We don’t really understand the requirements of the process.

Chapter 2 of 3. Need to catch up? Read the previous post in this series about scientific workflows.

Scientific research requires two kinds of effort. One is the generation and synthesis of original ideas by skilled practitioners. This is a desirable and often lauded talent that can spawn remarkable innovations in science and medical care. The second kind of effort is less visible, but equally important—the hard work required to turn an idea into reality. Executing the experiments, analyzing the data, and developing presentations of results are examples of this work. Although these latter efforts are necessary, and even enjoyable, they nonetheless can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive.

For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.

Frank Rich, New York Times

During the time that I was a clinical pharmacology fellow with Lewis Sheiner and Stuart Beal in San Francisco, the Voyager mission [1] was sending back incredible images of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

Did you watch the Oscars? A year ago, the 3D blockbuster, Avatar, was denied the Oscar for best film, which went to a low-budget war movie called The Hurt Locker. However, Avatar did win 3 Oscars in technical categories: Cinematography, Art Direction, and Visual Effects.

We’ve had a cold winter so far in the USA, don’t you think? Snow in Alabama, a blizzard in Boston, another in Chicago, an ice storm in Dallas before the Super Bowl. . .Yep, it’s cold outside. But, take a look at this picture from 100 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how cold it had to have been to make Niagara Falls freeze over.

If you want a cheap but out-of-this-world vacation, a short tour of the universe may be just what you are looking for. This video was posted by Adam Frank last January on a National Public Radio blog called 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.

I recently had the occasion to visit the Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Several things about this exhibit blew me away.

A new graph library that provides the right graphs at the right time and with the right information has been developed by Cognigen Corporation, a leading provider of pharmacometric analysis and support services. Comprehensive graphical exploratory data analysis is essential to building pharmacometric models of drug behavior. Previously, deciding which graphs were required to describe the data and then creating a new program for each graph consumed excessive time from both scientists and programmers.

I have long been addicted to The New York Times Book Review. It is not that I am a writer groupie as much as I find it fascinating to read about how a book came about.

Few among us would think highly of a leader who directed us to innovate on demand. After all, innovation is something that comes from a mysterious creative force that strikes like lightning to the fortunate inventor, bringing with it fame and fortune. Think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Bill Gates; Mark Zuckerberg; or Tim Berners-Lee (huh?) [1].

Although some meteorological modelers may disagree, it seems to me that models predicting development and movement of hurricanes are getting more and more accurate.

Scientists in the field of pharmaceutical research and development face a most daunting challenge. Our understanding of the diseases we work to treat grows more complex and perplexing with each new published study. Take, for example, the gusher of information coming out on Alzheimer’s disease. How can research findings from genetics, neurology, nutrition, protein chemistry, pharmacology, and epidemiology (just to name a few) be tracked, sorted, and used?

Seems like every time we learn something new, whether it is in biology or cosmology, we learn something else that just makes us sit back and say Wow. So it is with a recent story in The Economist about new information regarding one of the universal “constants” alpha.