Comments on: After 50 Years, MIT Chemists Finally Synthesize Elusive Anti-Cancer Compound

By: Phileas Frogg

Phileas Frogg — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:51:03 +0000

I’d go a step further.

I don’t even think, “science,” in the contemporary professional sense, even meaningfully exists outside of it’s social and financial functions. It’s just engineering and mathematics doing all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes while science gets to sweep in after the fact and get the credit publicly.

Most scientists are just glorified data accountants in lab coats, which is more of an insult to accountants than anything else – except accountants actually serve a valuable function.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 01:42:26 +0000

Handle, your observation is true in many domains: rather than the “science” preceding the engineering, the engineering ordinarily precedes the science. Merely the latest example is that of AI: no one has much of an idea how it works, and many deny that it works, and yet it does.

By: Handle

Handle — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 20:22:08 +0000

A genuinely impressive triumph. Yet again Feynman’s observation and amazement that with their complex and extensive suite of subtle techniques that the organic synthetic chemists keep beating the physicists in being able to construct molecules from atoms in ways we are still far from being able to accomplish in a nano-mechanistic manner.