Not very long ago, wild-eyed and fast-talking virtual reality evangelists daydreamed of the time in the near future when headmounts would become workaday tools. Few believed them.
But now one can walk into the laboratories of any number of pharmaceutical companies and find darkrooms where some scientist spends his or her day wearing goggles, staring into a 3-D world and twiddling dials as a way to design new medicines. For instance, Charlie Eigenbrot (shown here), a crystallographer at the bioengineering firm Genentech, uses a classic Evans & Sutherland graphics workstation and an off-the-shelf pair of Crystal Eyes goggles to determine the structure of an antibody. He compiles a sketchy outline of a molecule derived from x-ray crystallography and then uses visual inspection in 3-D to try to fit a virtual molecule of a different substance into this "cage." A molecule that fits could be a profitable antibody drug.
This kind of technology - manipulating the tinkertoy shape of virtual 3-D molecules - was used by Vertex Pharmaceuticals last year to develop a new class of compounds that suppress the HIV virus, yet are small enough to pass through the human gut. More and more pharmaceutical research is begun when a scientist, wearing VR goggles, steps into a "dry lab" - before the research ever even heads into the wet lab.
ELECTRIC WORD
The Watergate Way-Back Machine
The Dry Lab
