Embracing structural disorder

Organic chemists bring their own perspective to drug discovery, and to biology in general. We’re used to relatively small molecules – they’re easy to make and study, and we know their structures very well indeed. Biomolecules, by contrast, can seem huge and fuzzy to us. The smallest proteins and oligonucleotides are still relatively gigantic, and the biggest ones are basically incomprehensible in the atom-by-atom way that we prefer.