Chemistry and biology

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Abstract
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Spoken by Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2. It has been said that the solutions to many of the problems of physics are to be found in the attic of mathematics. The history of the interplay between chemistry and biology reflects a similar relationship. Many compounds—and some concepts—no longer at the cutting edge of chemical research have proven to be invaluable tools in cutting-edge biology and medicine. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the extraordinary success of cisplatin (Peyrone's salt), a compound known for over 100 years, as an anticancer drug. This extremely simple inorganic substance, often used as a basic example of isomerism in freshman chemistry textbooks, was found by Barnett Rosenberg et al. in 1969 to be a powerful antitumor agent (1), is now a complete cure for testicular cancer if the disease is caught early enough, and has shown effectiveness, particularly in combination therapy, against many other cancers as well. In a recent issue of PNAS, Yan et al. (2) provide a new example. They report that beryllofluoride, another simple inorganic compound, can be used to form stable analogs of the normally unstable phosphorylated form of bacterial signal transduction response regulator proteins, finally making the active state of these molecules amenable to detailed structural study. Response regulator proteins are the switches that control the response of bacteria to external stimuli. They constitute the second half of the so-called “two-component” signal transduction systems; the other half is an autokinase (3). The kinase phosphorylates an aspartate residue on the response regulator, converting the regulator protein structure from an “off” state to an “on” state. Phosphorylated regulators …