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Comment by drmeister | Hacker News Reader

Christian Schafmeister here - thank you for those kind words. I'm using Common Lisp as the basis for a programming environment for developing programmable matter (big, smart molecules and materials). I'll be announcing it soon - stay tuned. Designing molecules is one of the hardest problems in the world and it needs the most expressive, powerful language - Common Lisp. Oh - and C++, there's plenty of C++ in there as well :-).

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Your "molecular metaprogramming" presentation is, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful lectures I've ever encountered.

You've instantly inspired me to change career paths. This weekend I'm going to set up a home chemistry lab so that I may one day contribute to the amazing body of work you've started.

Does anybody on HN have some recommendations for learning intermediate chemistry? or setting up home labs? Just for context, I have math/CS degrees and have already taken introduction courses to physics, chemistry, and biology.

Synthetic chemistry is not really something you want to learn on your own in your basement. You can do it, but you're much much much better off just following real laboratory courses in college. They'll teach you proper lab safety in a safe environment, and the range of reactions you'll be able to perform will be much wider than what you could do in your basement. Most undergrads will perform a Grignard reaction, but I would not advise you do that in your basement.

If you're interested in theory, then it's a whole other thing.

(I'm a chemist.)

I obviously have no idea what can/can't be done at home yet :)

But UCLA is right down the street; I'll see what they have to offer.

Thanks for the tip!

Anything could be done at home, but at what cost (safety + economic)? If you get some lab experience by following courses, you might even land an internship in a synthesis lab if you're lucky :)

Chris Schafmeister here - wow. Well, just make sure you always wear your safety goggles.

Will do, chief! Thanks again for the inspiration.

Beautiful ideas! Do you have a way to control the final stereo-isomer that comes out of the synthesis? I'm thinking of the "256 stereo-isomer" molecule that you mentioned. Or is it a case of brute force and select afterwards?

We have absolute control over the final stereo-isomer that comes out of the synthesis. The large molecules are assembled from building blocks that each contain two stereo centers. We synthesize all four stereo-isomers of the building blocks in separate bottles and then put them together in different sequences to create the large molecules. Where the programming (Clasp Common Lisp in the molecular design language that I'll announce soon) comes in is we can build computer models of all stere-isomers and, in software, figure out which ones can do the job that we want. Then we just synthesize that and test it in the lab.

Awesome! Thanks for that.

This is why I love HN! Amazing video, and that project sounds fascinating. Where can I go to keep an eye on it?

Very, very interesting stuff, thanks.

Every couple of years I spend a couple of months with Lisp and then decide that I actually want to use Lisp to generate code in other languages. Recently I've been on a modern C++ kick, and have been really amazed at how Clang and LLVM are being used to do code indexing.

So, C++ + CL + LLVM + scientific computing ... wow!

I too enjoyed the spiroligomer talk, not all of it, but the deep down approach felt good. If I had more biochem knowledge I'd assemble a team.

Amazing work.

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