Well, Happy New Year. Here I list the best content I passed during the 2022.

Stuff in internet

Two nice posts on Medium, “The digital biotech startup playbook” and “The biotech startup’s guide to data and communication software”. I liked especially the latter one. Not a revelation now – but I would be so happy to read it 5 years ago. Internal wikis are solid, I can’t think about a better option to solve issues of communicating high-level research, ideas and paradigms in RnD. I don’t think that Notion is the best tool, depends on business rules regarding 3rd parties and cloud-based services. There are local solutions, FOSS if that matters, e.g. BlueSpice, a MediaWiki-based engine.

Chemistry book

A lot of buzz with ML/AI in the field, especially with the advent of AlphaFold. And ML succeeds in non-public sector, at least as I grasped from few conferences and other events I have attended this year. Not to get lost and educate myself a little, I found this nice book, “Machine Learning in Chemistry” (2020, RCS). I did not read it all, mostly drug-design related chapters. The main value came from the introductionary parts. A very consice material to start diving into the new area. I am not planning to shift focus into CompChem or data science, but will definitely try to broaden my understanding of ML, and maybe even do some homebrew experiments. While not being overhyped with the technology itself, I feel this is the basis of the next technological revolution.

Chemistry paper

Hands up, “Conformation-locking antibodies for the discovery and characterization of KRAS inhibitors”, a paper from Genentech. KRAS inhibitors are poping up in my feed over the year non-stop, but this particular study was extremely exciting. First, I absolutely love conformational selection model, not only as a rational to expand the druggable genome, but from purely mechanistic point of view. But also, even not thinking about applications to biophysics and SBDD, the paper has a really nice experimental strategy to deconvolute the states of target engagement in cells, very elegant. Beautiful applied science, the most interesting research article I read this year.

Fiction book

I did not read a lot of fiction this (?) year, unfortunately. So, Larry Niven’s “Lucifer’s Hammer” (1977) it is. I knew about this book, and I think that Niven is really good, howerver I read only the “Ringworld” series before. A year ago I watched “Don’t look up”, and decided to give it a try. An interesting story. Surprisignly, for people with science fiction tastes shapen by what was in trend in ex-USSR, Larry Niven is not that known.

Non-fiction book

“Bad Blood” (2018), the famous Theranos story. I swallowed the book in 2 days, a simple and highly entertaining read. This was my first investigastive journalism book, definitely not the last one.

Game

Pillars of Eternity (2015). Not proud of, but I sank some time in it. As a kid, I loved isometric cRPGs, with Fallout and Arcanum being my prime. I never loved Baldur’s Gate tho', possibly due to cumbersome DnD mechanics. Pillars of Eternity, (probably) a successor to the BioWare classics, is a masterpiece. Nice mechanics, very good characters, very well integrated quests and stories. I like games that bear literature value.

Movie

“Men” (2022). Not because of the narrative, and not even due to the brilliant play of Rory Kinnear. It is so nice to see not a screamer horror movie. Vibrant colors, beautiful landscapes, visually the movie is very appealing.

TV series

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” (2022). The anthology gave me vibes of “Masters of Horror” (2005). Most episodes are OK. There are two Lovecraft-based adaptations, “Dreams in the Witch House” being the weakest episode in the anthology and genuinely bad in general. Exceptionally bad, and here comes comparison to the same story in “Masters of Horror” comes, a proper Lovecraftian horror directed by Stuart Gordon. The other adaptation, “Pickman’s Model”, is really good. I do not mind deviations from the original story. But I am biased, “Pinkman’s Model” is my second favorite Lovecraft work.