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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Derek Lowe discusion of the paper https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-dis...

I think that was originally linked but got changed to the £30 to Elsevier version for some reason.

Derek Lowe as a science communicator, and others like him, is sorely needed to understand the real meaning and significance of the study and others. I say that as someone with a PhD in chemistry who's been to plenty of presentations on drug discovery topics.

It's difficult to calibrate statements made by other scientists unless you're well embedded within a field: Is this someone whose opinions matter? Are they the subject matter expert they make themselves out to be? Is this research itself truly impactful? Is it really 5 years until it will be realized outside of academic labs? Etc...

It's difficult to decipher questions around credibility because they rely on real-world interactions and associations that extend beyond the physical tokens of paper counts, publication venues, citations, and author lists that typically lag behind the front of human knowledge which is generated from real-world interactions. It can be simple things, like the insightful question a grad student, with minimal publication history, asks in a seminar.

Of course, the paywall is also unhelpful too, but a good, brief commentary by an appropriate commentator is a better link for 99% of prospective readers compared to most "peer reviewed" (scare quotes because that's a real question nowadays) articles.

Not that I'm a Derek Lowe fanboy or anything but the entirety of your comment is like "that guy needs to check himself" without, like, any specific context, any specific argument he's wrong on this specific question or like anything. It's like "deciphering questions around credibility" is hard ... all the way down. Where's yours? What are you saying?

Isn't the comment in fact praising Derek Lowe as a science communicator? In the second paragraph OP is just posing the questions that one might have when reading about a field not your own, that highlight the importance of reliable science communicators.

It's a very confusing comment since Derek Lowe is a chemist working in pharma but is being referred to only as a science communicator which I suspect most people would consider to be an implicit insult.

I think it says more about the person reading it as an implicit insult than it does OP. I am, I think, a fairly competent scientist, and know many great scientists. I know very few great scientific communicators.

Derek Lowe is someone whom I greatly admire and his work as a science communicator is a true service to the profession and to science at large. It is not intended as an insult in any way. I've known a great number of competent chemists, but few are as effective as communicators as he is.

My apologies for the lack of clarity in my prior comment; it was composed in haste. To be clear, I am a bit of a Derek Lowe fanboy. I value the work that he does in offering insight on his areas of expertise to the public at large because he has both the necessary understanding and the ability to communicate clearly. Few people have his level of background knowledge alongside the capacity to wade into the depths of pharmaceutical chemistry and then communicate that information and his personal perspective to enrich the commons.

What I was getting at with the issue of credibility is that I (or most others) would have time determining if a particular scholarly author in pharma is a good person to listen to on the subject. But having evidence that Derek Lowe is an honest broker of information in that domain, given his long history of commentary as well as other chemists I know who eagerly read his commentary, I'm willing to defer to his assessment.

The world needs more communicators like Derek Lowe who can give a clear-eyed, de-bullshittified perspective on the world, while also being great writers who are a pleasure to read. I follow his blog, and while a lot of it goes over my head (or seems very niche), a lot is great. The only other such writers I know about is Matt Levine at Bloomberg, and Atul Gawande (who's a bit less blunt, perhaps). And of course the late Carl Sagan. Any others?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson (US History) has a blunt near daily summary with frequent call backs to significant high and low points of the past two and a half centuries:

eg: August 15, 2026 - https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2026

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Cox_Richardson

OP here: the title of the thread still links to Derek Lowe's blog post, but the article discussed in the blog post was added to the body of the original post (not by me).

NB: The post was updated twice. The first changed the link to the Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article; the second changed it back to Derek Lowe's blog post with the NRDD article in the body.

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