Toxicologists seek structure-activity links
RON DAGANI · Chemical & Engineering News · 1981
Alexander Borodin, the famed 19th-century Russian composer of symphonies and opera, also was a notable chemist of his time. Like most musicians, he understood that certain musical structures—sequences of notes of specific pitch and duration— could elicit certain emotional responses in the listener. And as a chemist, he also was aware that, by analogy, certain chemical structures could produce predictable physiological responses in living organisms. It was during Borodin's lifetime, in fact, that physicians and scientists first began to investigate systematically the dependence of biological effects on structural differences between chemical homologs. Today that field is known as structure-activity relationships (SAR), and it has become an interdisciplinary endeavor bringing together chemists, biologists, toxicologists, statisticians, and computer and information scientists. How far it has progressed since Borodin's time was evident at a symposium on the subject held last month in Raleigh, N.C., sponsored by four Research Triangle Park institutions: the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CUT), ...