Maybe I can take up psychopharmacology again
Whenever I tell people I majored in psychopharmacology in college they laugh and say "Yeah, me too." Only in my case it's true. My undergraduate major was in Organic Chemistry with a concentration in psychopharmacology. My first job out of school was synthesizing morphine derivatives. The person at the next bench used pure THC as her starting material. The company I worked for kept a huge jar of it in a bank vault, and took it out to draw samples. It looked sort of like honey. Aahh, the good old days...
Where was I? Oh, yes, psychopharmacology. So when I read about the Chemistry search engine called Chmoogle (via SiliconBeat), I just had to take a look. What is really cool is that you can enter a search query using a java applet that lets you draw the molecular structure. I don't remember the structures of the molecules I used to work with, so I went to Wikipedia and looked up Nicotine:
With all the current fuss about the Feds grabbing Google's records, there's no way I'm going to put the structure of something fun, er, restricted on my blog. Anyway, I used Chmoogle's drawing tool, which is better than anything people dreamed about when I was in school, and then had Chmoogle search for it. I had the option of an exact match, or using this structure as a portion of a larger molecule. The substructure search is great if you are using a specific molecule as a starting material for synthesizing something larger, as I used to do with morphine. The exact match allows you to retrieve all types of useful information about that molecule.
So why should you care? It's not as if you're going to start a personal Meth lab. (Jesus, this post is going to come back to haunt me.) What is important to all of us is that Chmoogle shows what can be done beyond the same old, text style search among general purpose websites. This type of domain specific search holds tremendous promise for all types of applications. You could almost say it is an example of Web 2.0.
