
No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research - bcOpus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07106-5
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bigmit37
With the advent of MOOCs, I’m been taking lots of science courses to get a
basic foundation in science. I would love to do research without getting my
Phd and work on interesting projects.

I still have a lot to learn and read but it seems organic chemical experiments
are really expensive and lots, lots of trial and error is needed. From the
drug discovery course I took, robots are used to create millions of compounds
to look for potential hits and then even more trial and error is needed as
your progress through the subsequent steps. Also these big drug companies seem
to have lots of unshared proprietary data that greatly helps them reduce the
amount of experimentation that is needed to find potential drug candidates.

Unlike programming , the equipment chemicAl compounds, animal models all seem
to be very expensive.

I would love to create a potential drug, patent it but it just doesn’t seem
feasible unless you work for a biotech company :(

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arandr0x
I did drug discovery in grad school -- finding leads is generally not
something suitable for small labs, but studying them is. A big source of
compounds that actually work isn't high-throughput screening, it's isolating
the active ingredient of plants and fungal matter that has the desired
properties in nature, which is something that can in theory be done in a home
lab (cultivating eukaryotic cells is difficult compared to bacteria but there
are protocols and cell lines that aren't too expensive). This was how pretty
much all science was done before molecular biology was a thing, and it gave us
very useful compounds, including penicillin. (For the sake of the poor
critters, please don't do animal research if you have never worked with lab
animals before).

Most of figuring out which drugs are promising is biochemistry (and clinical
trials) not so much organic chemistry. I wouldn't say organic chemistry is
super inaccessible (given people with 0 education seem to be able to pop up
kitchen counter meth labs in no time), but doing it with a purpose that isn't
"follow this recipe" is difficult because a lot of stuff that looks like it
should be biologically active doesn't actually make it into the cell in the
first place. But I may be biased and I'm sure there are organic chemists
around that have an idea of how amateurs could go around doing some small
science in that area.

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bigmit37
Thanks for the reply! Sorry for the confusion : I should have stated
biochemistry.

I went through this course (below)which was really interesting. However the
course focused more on synthetic Chemistry and only briefly touched upon how
active compounds are found and extracted from natural compounds.

I also read about biotechnology and went through some lecturers on YouTube and
MIT intro to bio course. The impression I get is biotech (recombinant DNA) is
cheaper than drug discovery? Drug discovery seems to have a lot more factors
you need to be concerned about (clearance rate, bioavaibilty, binding to too
many proteins )that make seem more expensive

[https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the-
molecular...](https://www.edx.org/course/medicinal-chemistry-the-molecular-
basis-of-drug-discovery-0)

Would you mind recommending couple of books so I could gain some more
knowledge on the subject.

I just purchase “organic chemistry or drug design and drug action”

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weberc2
Is there a comprehensive list of citizen science initiatives anywhere?

