Happy Birthday, ChemDraw

The following is a guest editorial by Amanda Yarnell, C&EN’s managing editor, editorial. Like many chemists of a certain age, Derek Lowe remembers the exact moment when he learned about the chemical-structure-drawing program we now call ChemDraw. It was 1986, when Lowe, now a chemist at Vertex and the author of the influential In the Pipeline blog, was still in grad school at Duke University. “I remember the room, and where I was standing in it,” he said at a June 18 event in Cambridge, Mass., marking the program’s 30th anniversary. “The phrase ‘killer app’ applied.” Before ChemDraw, Lowe and his fellow chemists had to draw chemical structures by hand. Even with the help of the classic plastic template to create ring structures and rub-on letters to insert atoms, drawing structures pre-ChemDraw was painstaking work. Copying them, resizing them, or linking them within a reaction scheme was downright painful. Make ...