
We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir - tomstokes
https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-making-it-14665
======
kccqzy
Remdesivir is an analog of adenosine, one of the four building blocks of RNA.
Just look at the main structure and you'll agree they look similar. It turns
out the mechanism of action of this drug is that it's supposed to be confused
with adenosine, so that the viral RNA replication process uses remdesivir
instead of adenosine, which later breaks the RNA†.

Our body, or really, all biological processes can synthesize incredibly
complicated molecules that can take human chemists a huge amount of effort to
synthesize. It really is amazing how awesome our body is.

†: My description here is a dumbed down description. For a more precise
description see section 2 of _Arguments in favour of remdesivir for treating
SARS-CoV-2 infections_ , Wen-Chien Ko et al,
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092485792...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300832)

~~~
koboll
This is such a great description. Compare how Wikipedia describes the same
process
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine#Research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine#Research)]:

> The adenosine analog NITD008 has been reported to directly inhibit the
> recombinant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the dengue virus by terminating
> its RNA chain synthesis. This interaction suppresses peak viremia and rise
> in cytokines and prevents lethality in infected animals, raising the
> possibility of a new treatment for this flavivirus.

Absolute gibberish to someone with limited knowledge of biology.

~~~
oefrha
Scientific articles on Wikipedia aren’t written for laymen, although some
could be understood by laymen as a side effect. For example as a
physicist/mathematician I expect precise and physically/mathematically
accurate statements rather than hand-wavy analogues that the average Joe might
be able to make sense of, and that’s how I edit. Now, it’s okay to also
include more approachable explanations, but they’re not a must.

~~~
nitrogen
I know Wikipedia has evolved considerably from its original intent, but isn't
one of the quintessential goals of an encyclopedia to have an approachable
summary of every topic?

~~~
leetcrew
Wikipedia isn't quite like a traditional encyclopedia in this regard. it
covers many technical topics that would be too niche to include in the latter.

random example: take a look at the Wikipedia article for "currying". [0] while
quite accessible to someone with a math/cs background, this would be pretty
much unintelligible to someone who wasn't familiar with the notion of a
mathematical function. perhaps it could be rewritten to be even more
accessible, but what would be the point of explaining currying to someone who
doesn't know about functions and arguments in the first place? brittannica
doesn't even cover this topic.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying)

~~~
nitrogen
The concept of partial specialization can be useful in many ways. I could see
the concept of applying a process to one process and getting a new process for
creating processes as somewhat applicable to business analysis, process
engineering, analysis and design of government, etc.

I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a
more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help
all uses:

\- Specialists would more easily be able to refresh their memories of topics
they use infrequently before diving into the details.

\- People in neighboring specialties can more easily branch out.

\- Informed laypeople (e.g. experts in other industries) could more easily
find new ideas for cross-pollination into their own field.

As one random example I have recently found application for an algorithm
mainly reserved for use in geophysics and cartography to audio signal
processing, but learning and applying it took way more research than it really
should have.

~~~
acqq
> I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having
> a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could
> help all uses

I'm curious how you would rewrite that first paragraph then:

"In mathematics and computer science, currying is the technique of translating
the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments into evaluating a
sequence of functions, each with a single argument. For example, a function
that takes two arguments, one from X and one from Y, and produces outputs in
Z, by currying is translated into a function that takes a single argument from
X and produces as outputs functions from Y to Z. Currying is related to, but
not the same as, partial application."

BTW I don't like that paragraph, it looks to me that it completely "misses the
point" because as far as I understand currying is not about the sets but about
the arguments. If it would be about the sets it would be just "a rewrite to a
function that accepts the subset of the previous input set" and it's not about
that.

~~~
leetcrew
from a certain perspective, it's hard to talk about currying without talking
about sets. "function" itself is defined as a special type of relation between
sets. imo, the first paragraph does a good job introducing both the formal and
practical meaning of currying to people who have enough background to find the
topic useful.

simple wikipedia does take your approach though:

> Currying is a technique used in mathematics and computer science that
> consists of changing a function that takes several arguments into a number
> of functions that each take one argument. Mathematicians Moses Schönfinkel
> and Gottlob Frege laid the groundwork for this technique, which is named
> after Haskell Brooks Curry. Currying is used in Lambda calculus. Some
> programming languages, such as ML and Haskell say that functions can only
> have one argument. [0]

that's actually the entire article. not sure how useful it is, but at least
they tried.

[0]
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying)

~~~
acqq
I still believe that naming the sets in the paragraph I've quoted is
completely superfluous in the sentence I've quoted. It just sounds more
"mathy" but I'm quote sure that either it doesn't convey more useful
information or it is not formal enough to be exact enough, so to me it looks
it fails both ways.

------
eyegor
This article really reinforces my choice to drop ochem in college. It's funny
how deciphering assembly code seems downright mundane compared to this jargon.
Like, I get how given the process you could recreate things, or you could
devise possible reactions based on electron shells and bonding tendencies, but
how do researchers even figure out how to make these reactions happen?
Especially when they require -100C, or +5atm of pressure.

~~~
applecrazy
Isn’t there analytical chemistry software?

~~~
Reelin
Yes, but good luck interpreting the output if you aren't an accomplished
synthetic organic chemist.

~~~
fuzzfactor
Analysts can benefit tremendously from better knowledge of research, synthesis
or process work, and vice versa.

But great professionalism can also be developed without as much cross-
functionality between subdisciplines.

Like many things, detailed efforts unique to the subprofession can be the most
essential.

------
aerovistae
Really interesting getting a window into the world of professional chemistry.
So impactful on all of us but so much more opaque. We see CS jokes/memes all
over the place, even if only those who program get them, but we never see chem
jokes, or only sparingly and rarely beyond a high school level.

~~~
someguy101010
I wish I knew the havkernews equivalent for chemistry, finance, etc. The
closest thing I've found was
[https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news) for
nutrition.

~~~
dcolkitt
Nuclear Phynance is your best bet for a HN like community in quant finance.

~~~
mjthrowaway1
That community has been pretty dead for years. Used to love it.

~~~
applecrazy
Is there a successor to this forum? I’m a CS undergrad and kind of want to
explore this field.

~~~
qnt
No, there isn’t really. There is a treasure of info on that site though. I
also have a CS background before I moved to the quant area.

Things that might help pique your interest:

\- For both academic and practical problems:
[http://quant.stackexchange.com/](http://quant.stackexchange.com/)

\- For keeping tabs on new ideas in the blogosphere (generally average,
occasionally something useful):
[https://quantocracy.com/](https://quantocracy.com/)

\- Useful information on getting started in the field:
[http://quantstart.com/articles](http://quantstart.com/articles)

Outside of the academic literature, it is quite an insular field, so you have
to work to find interesting ideas. If you can make money, you probably won’t
be sharing much with anyone. A notable exception might be Rob Carver’s blog
([https://qoppac.blogspot.com/](https://qoppac.blogspot.com/)).

From a CS background, a simple path to see if you might enjoy “quant
investing” is to read some old papers from e.g. AQR about factor investing
(Momentum, Value) and try to implement it with Interactive Brokers or similar.
You should be able to roll something together with very little capital.

On the “quant trading” side of things, try the Avellaneda paper for
statistical arbitrage, do some digging about RenTech, read the LTCM book, etc
etc. Not something you can do without a lot of infrastructure behind you, but
there’s enough information around to work out if it’s interesting.

~~~
applecrazy
Thank you for the list of resources. Given the current situation, this will
make interesting reading/study material.

If you're comfortable, could you please share how you made the transition to
quant from a programming/SWE background?

~~~
qnt
I'll give the paths that I saw available to someone with a usual CS
background. Not hard rules, but the distinction between developer (support) &
trader (revenue generation) will be harder to overcome the later on in a
career that it happens. Trading/research roles are typically compensated as a
direct function of the money you generate, which is where the real upside is.

1) Quant Developer: Trading infrastructure, working on research platforms,
taking algorithms created by researchers & deploying into production. Wouldn't
want to do this at a bank, but at a hedge fund or proprietary trading firm
it'd be fun. Compensation is good, lower variability, but somewhat more
limited upside. DE Shaw, 2 sigma, Jane Street, etc.

2) Quant Researcher: A high quality quant masters degree at a minimum (think
Baruch MFE), but often a PhD. Working on systematic trading research, market
making algorithms, optimal hedging for large books of derivatives, etc.
Usually a decent salary, but total compensation varies wildly based on
performance.

3) Trader: More and more similar to #2 these days, but more focus on execution
of strategies and real-time action rather than research, and more directly
responsible for PnL. Optiver, IMC, SIG, etc. A quant masters degree probably
isn't required to get a foot in the door, but I think it would help in the
long term (e.g. helps build more rigorous understandings of why what you're
doing might be working).

~~~
applecrazy
This was very helpful. Thanks for sharing.

------
Vaslo
In my former life I was a graduate organic chemist, but I “quit” with a
Masters. I loved Synthetic Chemistry as an undergrad and thought I wanted a
PhD in. There were three lousy things (for me) about the career that made me
bail.

1). So many syntheses have horrible yields just like this one. You’d start
with grams of material to end up with micrograms. I loved solving these
problems as an undergrad in books, but reality was far different. You don’t
think much about side products until you start doing novel chemistry.

2). So much trial and error. There were happy go lucky chemists that fell into
projects that were smooth as butter, while brilliant chemists would toil 12
hour days to try and something to write up as a thesis. I was neither
brilliant nor lucky and took 4 different projects over two years before
finally landing on something marginally MS worthy. They need a journal of
failed chemistry because only the working stuff gets published. So many
failures could be logged so I didn’t waste my time doing non-working or poor
yielding reactions.

3). Suspicious results in journals. I would read about a reaction and someone
would put a 75% yield as their result and I could barely get 20. I always
thought I was just bad, but a really smart chemist challenged me one day and
tried to do it himself and couldn’t do much better. He tried it 30 different
ways over the year as he did other stuff. He never could get a good yield. We
talked to our advisor and we wanted to challenge the result, but the advisor
didn’t want to start trouble. It was past the time I decided to leave with a
masters, but made me feel a little better about my lousy abilities. No one
could ever possibly doublecheck every result from every publication anyways.

All this said, there are some brilliant and patient scientists out there that
drive the field forward. Just a few rough around the edge items I’d love to
see change.

~~~
lazyjones
As an IT guy, I am wondering why this is still a mostly manual and rather
dangerous process. Surely programmable machines can be built to process
reagents in a safe and flexible way?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
I'm a controls engineer. We're very good at making machines that will do a
single process over and over. It's insanely difficult to do arbitrary
processes with one machine.

~~~
wuschel
Hi,

That is a very good question. In my PhD I built, among other things, a very
primitive parallel stirring system in order to speed up the synthesis of test
batches. Although a very crude device, there was tons of stuff that I needed
to optimize.

There are many steps in the practical work that is chemical synthesis. It
might be removing air, adding reagents in different elemental states,
cooling/heating/keeping and certain temperature, observing the reaction,
taking aliquots, terminating reaction, and the many steps of purification.

I'd argue that while automation is possible to a certain degree (continuous
reactor systems are the most the most interesting IMHO), the resulting
mashines are always problem (reagent, reaction, etc) specific. And here lies
the problem.

------
est31
> Here are the real numbers for the reactions in Scheme 1: 0.25 x 0.58 x 0.74
> x 0.21 x 0.23 = .005 (0.5%)

This reminds me of the problems to scale up EUV lithography which are
bottlenecked on producing strong enough EUV light. They put in 20 kW of power
to get out 200 W at the target wavelength of 13.5 nm, so light generation
itself only has 1% efficiency, and then you need to reflect it at mirrors etc.
to focus it (lenses don't work at those wavelength) and that makes only 2% of
the light actually reach the waver [2].

[1]:
[https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/16569161/the-s...](https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/16569161/the-
secret-of-euv-generation)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography#Light_source_power,_throughput,_and_uptime)

------
ebg13
The writing is so good, I had to double check that it wasn't written by Derek
Lowe.

~~~
samcheng
Here's his most famous article on FOOF (Dioxygen Diflouride)

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)

It seems there are multiple chemist-author hybrids out there!

~~~
ggm
_At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into
monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature._

Gentle and Forgiving nature...

~~~
HarryHirsch
The inimitable Martin Poliakoff demonstrates it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw)

~~~
ebg13
"It was much more exciting than I thought" is a great opening line.

------
tikej
I want to make remark about organic synthesis from the perspective of person
who is engineer of chemistry by training as did his fair share of organic
synthesis (and eventually moved to computational atomic and molecular
physics).

It is one of the oldest and very established fields. Unfortunately practices
aren’t great. The preparation formulas are often vogue, imprecise and
difficult to reproduce. This comes from the fact that often the sizes and
types of glassware are not specified, some informations are omitted (how
quickly something is changed not only to what value e.g. heat up to 100
degrees but it does not say over what time) etc. Chemists usually (except some
theoretical/computational specialisations) don’t have any training in
algorithms or programming.

There are novel developments such as
[https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2018/november/headl...](https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2018/november/headline_624196_en.html)
and references therein. I’m optimistic about them but I expect strong
opposition from older faculty. They see synthesis as more than art and think
that one has to have “good hand” in order to be a good organic chemist.

I think some generational shift will be necessary in order to change this
discipline to more reproducible, strict and reliable. It will come but not
that soon :)

------
franciscop
One too many zeroes here:

    
    
        0.25 x 0.58 x 0.74 x 0.21 x 0.23  = .005 (0.05%)
    

The 0.005 seems to be correct, so that should be 0.5%. The rest of the article
also uses "0.5%" correctly.

~~~
Josh_Bloom
It’s a running joke between my readers and me. EVERY SINGLE TIME I have done
even the simplest of math (n= more than 20) I’ve screwed it up and been
corrected by a reader. I don’t know how I made it out of high school.

~~~
franciscop
No problem! Basic math mistakes are dangerous because they might take
credibility out of the rest of the article, but this one seemed very well
written and it shows that you know what you are writing about so I don't think
it's a big deal.

I noticed only because something ticked on me when I read "0.005 (0.05%)", it
"felt wrong" so I double checked.

------
mettamage
This was a lot of fun to read and quite accessible. I remember that I was
horrible at chemistry in high school, but the right things were ELI5'ed.

I like HN in general, but this particular article gave me the same feeling
that I had when I first discovered HN a couple of years ago.

------
roenxi
Although very interesting, this article isn't a great introduction because a
critical part of the picture is missing - the availability of the inputs.

Sticking to simple stuff; mines produce iron at a rate measured in thousand-
tonnes per hour with yields of potentially sub-30% compared to volume of earth
moved. Ammonia and many acids are presumably measured in tonnes or kilograms
produced per day. Low yields make the process-oriented sad, but what matters
is absolute ability to produce; not yield.

All that doesn't take anything away from this article; it just makes it hard
to interpret what 'royal pain to synthesize' means in practice. The process
isn't basic chemistry; but that isn't really saying much.

~~~
alkonaut
Exaxtly this. Are the inputs available and we can spend just a few tens of
billions on building gigafactories to make this process parallel and
controlled? Then it’s like making microchips from silicon or gold from ore.
Terrible yield but cheap inputs and a scalable process.

If the inputs are expensive or the process can’t scale (to a billion doses in
12 months, say) then that’s worrying and perhaps indicates this isn’t a good
candidate vaccine.

~~~
alkonaut
Edit: remdesivir is a therapeutic, not a vaccine, so it is useful in much
smaller quantities than a vaccine.

------
endorphone
Chemistry is absolutely fascinating. One of my long-time goals has been to
make a learning chemistry game of some sort. Players building bonds and
molecules, solving problems by creating reactions, etc. Orbits and ions and
quantum states.

Something truly educational, and of course one of the people I wanted to
educate was myself by forcing myself to learn much more than my high-school
level of chemistry.

I've gone down this road a few times, each time giving up on the absolutely
scale of even the most rudimentary understanding.

------
abhisuri97
This brings me back to orgo lab. A six step synthesis was torture when you
were graded by your final yield exactly bc of the compounding nature of small
mistakes in each step. Even if you get fairly good yields of 80 to 90% per
step, you’d end up with a 53% at best and hope to god that everyone else did
equally badly so the curve would save you.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "Fortunately, there are creatures called "process chemists" – guys who
laugh at the discovery synthesis, insult as many of us as possible, and then
make it better so that the yields are higher and some of the most dangerous
chemical reagents and solvents – ones you really don't want to use on a large
scale – are replaced by others. They are generally a bunch of mutants, but
they do a great job in "fixing" the synthesis used by the discovery chemists."

This really cracked me up. In my IT world the equivalent for "mutant" would be
refactoring, right? I did "mutated" this way a few times in the past to much
of the horrors of my boss(es)/manager(s) when they learned the next day.

------
bionhoward
ML is useful to design the reaction pathways to make these chemicals. If we
find safer/better/cheaper ways to make medicines like Remdesivir with deep
learning, and publish them, then chemists may have an easier time of it.

If Remdesivir data looks good this month, there will be a rush to produce it,
and if there’s only one published way to do that, then the ingredients for
that one approach will potentially be hard to find. Thus we can benefit from
different approaches which start from different raw materials.

Lots of cool Arxiv papers on this and Graph Neural Nets, Soft actor-critic, or
Transformers can be interesting approaches. The transport theory seems like a
good way to make a value function. How much time and money does it take to
produce a given chemical by a given set of reactions? That’s a gajillion
dollar question.

I spent way too much time last year looking at permutation-invariant distance
metrics similar to Fused Gromov Wasserstein to invent an Atom Mover Distance,
please let me know if you figure that out! DeepChem library is a solid
framework, as are Tensorflow and Pytorch...

If anyone’s looking for a way to contribute to the COVID-19 response, open
source data/algorithms to design synthesis pathways can be a strong approach.
Everyone loves to use Deep Learning to design drugs, but it is valuable to
design ways to make drugs, too!

------
gorgoiler
Very funny writing style while being incredibly informative. Read from top to
bottom with glee. I had a feeling organic synthesis was difficult but not
_this difficult_.

Missed a trick not titling it:

“(1OO)OMG we made one gram...” :)

------
failuser
This makes the biological chemistry so awe-inspiring. Everything is done at
about the same body temperature and at the same pressure, just with right
catalysts.

------
manav
It’s been almost two decades since I took a chemistry class, looks more
foreign to me than code to a non-programmer.

~~~
ehsankia
To be fair organic chemistry is its own beast and far messier than normal
chemistry classes.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Yes, there's a difference between pushing electrons on paper and making
compounds behave in the lab as they do on paper.

Scaleup from lab to pilot plant to production is another different beast.

------
saadalem
I was able to create several small molecule candidates which achieved docking
scores of almost -18 but they still need to be assessed for their synthetic
feasibility. (Docking scores of leading existing drugs (HIV inhibitors) are
around -10 to -11 (the more negative the score the better), Remdesivir drug is
around -13 which already entered clinical testing.

I know that binding affinity has been shown not to be the best indicator of
efficacy always, but I want to know if it's feasible, if someone can help

~~~
person_of_color
Are you a chemist?

------
jluxenberg
Press release from Gilead published yesterday says they aim to have 500,000
treatment courses by October (they reduced a 12 month production process to 6
months): [https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on-
covid-1...](https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on-
covid-19-from-our-chairman-and-ceo)

------
VSerge
Oh the pain of biochemistry! Thanks to the author for making this available to
everyone, and reminding these of us who ran screaming from the labs why our
decision is not among the ones we might regret. Joking aside, I hope this
molecule can be synthesized efficiently, and that it can be preempted from
Gilead somehow, as this company has a history of price gouging of the worst
kind. They are down there with the oxy makers, the worst of the worst, causing
deaths through their pricing policies, and resulting lack of affordable
treatment. The ideals of medicine mean nothing to these, and public health
should take precedence over the interests of such despicable companies.

------
ngngngng
I've never learned a bit of Chemistry. I assume there are formulas to
determine how substrates and reagents will react with each other? And the
process chemists understand these formulas better than most?

Apologies for the assumptions in these question, but are there many reactions
in organic chemistry that are completely unknown?

This actually seems pretty fun. I'd love to have a reason to study it and a
means to do something with my studies.

~~~
Symbiote
Which country's education system doesn't have any chemistry at all?

Chemical formulae are required study for 11-14 year olds in England, for what
it's worth. (Probably starting with words: methane + oxygen → carbon dioxide,
and later writing a balanced equation: CH₄ + 2O₂ → CO₂ + 2H₂O.) The reaction
presented is obviously much, much more complicated, but the same concept.

Edit: catalysts are covered too, although I don't know if the notation of
putting them above the → is introduced at this age.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqd2mp3/revision/6](https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqd2mp3/revision/6)

~~~
ngngngng
This was in California. I had to take a science class but there were many
options and I just took other things besides chemistry.

------
garmaine
> remdesivir, possibly the most promising candidate

Is there any evidence of this? It was a highly anticipated drug, but the first
studies it was in showed only slight improvement over expected outcomes, far
less than was seen with the chloroquine/zinc/antibiotic combo treatment.

I mean I think it's still interesting as a possible drug to add to the
cocktail for maximum effectiveness. But let's not oversell it.

------
joyj2nd
"liquid chromatography, is frequently used. On a small scale this is fine, but
when kilograms of material are required the process becomes unwieldy."

I did not understand this. liquid chromatography scales up quite well. There
are other methods like Electorphoresis, salt precipitations etc., that don't.

~~~
Metacelsus
>liquid chromatography scales up quite well

Not compared to recrystallization or distillation. Try running a column on
10kg scale and get back to me.

(I worked in an o-chem lab for 2 years in undergrad, and the biggest we could
do was ~20 grams at once)

------
aazaa
> n-BuLi is short for n-butyllithium, which bursts into flame if exposed to
> oxygen or water.

It looks like the author is overselling some of the dangers here.

While you really don't want to dump n-BuLi into water, you have no reason to
either.

The problem child of the class to which n-BuLi belongs is t-BuLi. That will
spontaneously ignite in air, whereas n-BuLi will not. There was a very high-
profile case I believe at UCLA a few years back in which a student using
t-BuLi in the lab caused a fire with it and ended up dying.

[https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i31/Learning-
UCLA.html](https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i31/Learning-UCLA.html)

Also, I find this article confusing in the way it's written. Take the title,
for example. It gives the impression that the author is describing his own
efforts to make remdesivir ("we").

What he's really describing is some preps he found in the literature. And with
a little too much hyperbole for my taste.

~~~
Metacelsus
nBuLi is tame compared to tBuLi, I agree. But on large scale the reaction with
air can generate enough heat to ignite. (And with humid air it's worse.)

------
Scoundreller
"(2) The one-gram dose is a guess based on the doses of other antiviral
medicines."

You're in luck, the first dose is 200mg, and then 100 mg daily after that.

Unfortunately, it's also IV, so you have a number of extra steps after
synthesis to ensure sterility.

------
aledalgrande
LOL at the way process chemists were introduced

------
jijji
favipiravir is alot cheaper to synthesize and is used as a drop in replacement
for remdesivir all over asia...

Good things to have on hand during this covid-19 pandemic (because you can't
rely on hospitals to give it to you) are:

1) hydroxychloroquine sulfate taken orally 400 mg per day for a week ($180/kg
on alibaba)

2) azithromycin taken orally 500 mg per day for a week ($150/kg on alibaba)

3) Camostat mesilate taking orally 200 mg three times a day for a week [1]
($50/g on alibaba)

4) favipiravir one dose of 1600mg two times on the first day, and then 600mg
twice per day after that for a week [2]. ($40/g on alibaba)

5) covid-19 rapid test kits that use blood antibody tests and produce results
between 3 to 10 minutes and cost about $1.50 per kit [3] .... although it
looks like in the last week or so Alibaba has been blocking searches for these
kits for some reason... although the search below does work but you have to
look at the suppliers to find the ones that are actually selling it.

all this stuff can be bought on Alibaba and delivered in a week

[1]
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04321096](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04321096)

[2] [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anti-flu-drug-
effe...](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anti-flu-drug-effective-in-
treating-covid-19#Favipiravir-maycombat-SARS-CoV-2)

[3]
[https://m.alibaba.com/products/covid-19_rapid_test_kit.html](https://m.alibaba.com/products/covid-19_rapid_test_kit.html)

~~~
autonoshitbox
A drop-in replacement for something that barely just finished clinical trials.
Ok.

Stop suggesting people buy dangerous drugs from Alibaba. This should be
bannable.

------
fg6hr
That's some really complex mess. How much do these chemists get paid?

~~~
barkingcat
If they don't have grants, $0. If they work in a lab for someone who has a
grant, $0, but with credit on the papers (that's why there's 35 authors on the
paper, 1 person got paid, the rest got name credit in the hopes that they get
noticed by a commercial company wanting to monetize this process, so in the
future they get their own gig). If they work in a commercial lab, maybe they
make a little.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
So... Why does anyone do it? We're talking about throwing years of your life
at this work; how on earth is it pulling people in if it can't pay bills?

~~~
auxym
That's why I'm clueless at all the politicians and journalists claiming we
have a STEM shortage, we need to boost STEM education, need more kids
interested in STEM careers...

STEM = science technology engineering math

CS/software has huge demand and salaries to go with it (yay, ads)

Traditional (civil/mech/ee/chem/etc) engineering is OK. You'll never be rich
but you'll always be comfortable. (I've had plumbers claim theye make more
than me).

Science and math have really bleak career outlooks. Tenure track faculty jobs
are a crapshoot. Industry jobs are scarce. Most people I know from college
that went into the sciences are either still stuck in PhD or postdocs, or quit
after BS/MS and now working as lab technicians or equivalent. Not even
glorified, just plain old overqualified lab techs in QC departments and such.

Edit: As a final note, here's a 2015 report from OSPE, an organization
representing engineering professionals in Ontario, Canada:
[https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis...](https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis-
in-engineering-labour-market.pdf) An except:

"Information referred to in this report is derived from the Canadian National
Census 2011 National Household Survey (NHS). According to the 2011 NHS1, only
about 30 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario who held a bachelor’s
degree or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering
managers. Fully two-thirds of engineering-degree holders were not working in
engineering at all. Many had jobs that didn’t necessarily require a university
degree."

~~~
barkingcat
To be fair, plumbers do make more than the average code jockey doing
maintenance type programming at regular computer jobs (outside of the faang
universe, there are a lot of average paying computing/coding jobs - think
programming forms for web stores, coming up with fillable pdf forms for
ordering, etc)

Plumbing is an essential service, and in emergencies, hourly rates can go into
$300+/hour. So why don't everyone go into plumbing? Cause it's a shit job (/s)

Jokes aside, my take on the science job contradiction is that current American
society does not respect nor want the products of science.

Think vaccines - when we have an emergency, everyone wants one, but in "normal
times", think about where the pockets of the anti-vaccination movement have
taken hold: rich communities in California where science should have had the
best chance of surviving, but is struggling.

Communities in the American Southern states who are having trouble keeping
evolution and science curriculums in tact are another example.

------
Josh_Bloom
@ebg13 Thank you! That may be the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten. Derek
is the god of carbon as far as I’m concerned. Josh

~~~
nik_0_0
You missed the reply, but I hope ebg13 finds this! Great writing.

~~~
dang
I briefly moved the comment, then saw that Josh_Bloom had posted another copy
of this reply to the right place.

------
Glosster
Does anyone know what's the probability that Remdesivir is indeed a solution
against Coronavirus?

------
franciskim
Strange that there's not one mention of Avigan / Favipiravir.

------
quickthrower2
Funny just saw this comment on reddit. Related
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/fuuuy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/fuuuyw/im_meredith_mattlin_a_24yearold_cancer/fmeu2pp)

