Natural Products

The €140 sheet that outperformed our entire manuscript queue Last Tuesday I spent €140 on a single A0 printout. It is now the most valuable asset in my lab. The paper we were drafting? It is still sitting on a reviewer’s desk somewhere in Belgium. The poster got us

The quiet engine of modern drug discovery I remember the first time I walked into a university lecture hall and heard someone say that organic synthesis is "dead." The room went silent. Then a professor in the back row laughed and said, "That's exactly why

The Ghost in the Data Machine Here is a fact that will make your stomach drop. A recent analysis of over two thousand published studies found that less than one in three could be replicated by independent labs. This is not a niche problem. It hits the heart of our

The Reproducibility Crisis in Natural Products You might be surprised to learn that half of all natural product papers fail replication. Staggering, right? I saw this trend clearly during my recent audit of lab data in Utrecht. The issue is not the molecules themselves. It is how we study them.

The Silent Crisis in Dutch Labs Look at your bench right now. Seriously. Count how many flammable, petroleum-derived solvents are sitting within arm's reach. Most of us in the Dutch health science community treat these chemicals like tap water. We assume the supply chain is infinite. That

The Spark That Lit The Fuse Again It was supposed to be over. After years of containment and recovery, the global scientific community thought we had turned the page on the chaotic early days of the pandemic. We were wrong. Just last week, a heated Senate hearing brought Dr. Anthony