Corin Wagen

If you’re wondering “is this a joke,” the answer is both yes and no.

TW: profanity, sarcasm, misuse of theological concepts.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is the information content of different biomolecules.

The Rebuilding of the Temple is Begun, Gustave Doré (1866) As AI systems get more powerful and better at scientific tasks, what will the new research ecosystem look like?

Yesterday, an interesting paper was released by Prescient Design (Genentech), “Evaluating the Progression of Large Language Model Capabilities for Small-Molecule Drug Design.”

Martin Luther in the Circle of Reformers (1600s) TW: stridently anti–Roman Catholic rhetoric, medieval realist metaphysics Popular histories of the Reformation typically emphasize the discontinuity between medieval theology and the Reformers.

Long ago, there were no software companies.

(Previously: 2022, 2023, 2024.) #1.

The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones, Gustave Doré (1866) Last week I had the privilege of attending the 2025 Progress Conference, which brought together a diverse cadre of people working on progress, metascience, artificial intelligence, and related…

I don’t write about my non-working life much on the Internet; my online presence has been pretty closely tied to Rowan and I try to adhere to some level of what Mary Harrington calls “digital modesty” regarding my family.

The Astronomer, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1668) I’ve been sitting on this post for well over a year.

The Moneylender and his Wife, Quentin Matsys (1514) Inspired by related writings from Scott Alexander, who is funnier than me.

Gustave Doré, illustration for Paradise Lost (1866) In center-right tech-adjacent circles, it’s common to reference René Girard.

(This post is copied from some notes I gave to our summer interns at Rowan almost without modification.

The past is powerful evidence for arguments about the present.

Expanded from a post on X, which I felt didn’t do a good job expressing all of what I meant.

“You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f***** education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”

Recently, Kelsey Piper shared that o3 (at time of writing, one of the latest reasoning models from OpenAI) could guess where outdoor images were taken with almost perfect accuracy.

A traditional iconographic depiction of Abraham's visitors.

In scientific computation, where I principally reside these days, there’s a cultural and philosophical divide between physics-based and machine-learning-based approaches.

With apologies to Andrew Marvell.

In 2007, John Van Drie wrote a perspective on what the next two decades of progress in computer-assisted drug design (CADD) might entail.

This post is an attempt to capture some thoughts I have about ML models for predicting protein–ligand binding affinity, sequence- and structure-based approaches to protein modeling, and what the interplay between generative models and simulation may look…

(This is a bit of a departure from my usual chemistry-focused writing.)

(Previously: 2022, 2023.) #1.

This post assumes some knowledge of molecular dynamics and forcefields/molecular mechanics.

Abhishaike Mahajan recently wrote an excellent piece on how generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis (disclaimer: I gave some comments on the piece, so I may be biased).

I've been playing around with generating non-equilibrium conformations by molecular dynamics recently, and I've been thinking about how to best parse the outputs of a dynamics simulation.

Scientific software can be confusing, particularly when you're doing something that the software isn't primarily intended for.

Update: As of October 2024, you can now run DiffLinker calculations through Rowan, my computational chemistry startup.

Pure mathematics has all sorts of unexpected connections to other fields, and chemistry is no exception.

Apologies for the long hiatus: we've had some health issues in the family, and startup life has been particularly overwhelming.

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote that “traditional physical organic chemistry is barely practiced today,” which attracted some controversy on X.

In this post, I’m trying something new and embedding calculations on Rowan alongside the text.

(Previously: 2022) #1.

“And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it.

I took a pistol course in undergrad, and while I was a poor marksman I enjoyed the experience.

“Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.”

Quantum computing gets a lot of attention these days.

In 2019, ChemistryWorld published a “wish list” of reactions for organic chemistry, describing five hypothetical reactions which were particularly desirable for medicinal chemistry.

"Hi, would you like to connect on LinkedIn?"

“A cord of three strands is not easily broken.”

ICYMI: Ari and I announced our new company, Rowan!

Recently in off-blog content: I coauthored an article with Eric Gilliam on how LLMs can assist in hypothesis generation and help us all become more like Sharpless.

Since the ostensible purpose of organic methodology is to develop reactions that are useful in the real world, the utility of a method is in large part dictated by the accessibility of the starting materials.

TW: stereotypes about molecular dynamics.

An important problem with simulating chemical reactions is that reactions generally take place in solvent, but most simulations are run without solvent molecules.

TW: sarcasm.

The concept of pKa is introduced so early in the organic chemistry curriculum that it’s easy to overlook what a remarkable idea it is.

You are a scientist, not a lab monkey.