"This is a completely novel chemical entity that was not found in nature," says Mike Varney, a computational chemist at San Diego-based Agouron. "It is not a biotechnology product. It is not a product cloned or screened. We truly built it, atom by atom."
The study of how the shapes of molecules influence their propensity to react is an interdisciplinary field sometimes called molecular recognition. Working under this broad heading are structural and cell biologists; computer scientists; and theoretical, experimental, and computational chemists. Computational chemists owe much of their progress in developing software for modeling molecules to the seminal work of Nobel laureate Donald Cram, who in the early 1970s began making models of molecules with the only tools then available--hand-held models in which balls depicted the atoms and sticks represented the bonds between them. After synthesizing the molecules conceived in this fashion, Cram then reacted them with a target ...
