![\"topics-over-time\"](\"/549b22d40c80b0baa43ff07ab370b8bf/topics-over-time.svg\")
\nBlogs gave scientists a way to talk about their work in public without waiting for a journal or a press office. Science blogging grew out of the mailing-list culture of the late 1990s, found its footing with networks such as ScienceBlogs in 2006, and settled into a format where a researcher reads a paper and tells the rest of us what it means↗︎. The people writing were mostly working scientists with graduate degrees and academic affiliations↗︎, and what emerged was a commentary layer on top of the literature, faster than peer review and more candid than a press release. That layer has always been thin in one place: industry.
\nIn the Pipeline is the exception. Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist who spent his career at Schering-Plough, Bayer, Vertex, and Novartis, started the blog on February 7, 2002 with a post called The Latest Thing↗︎, the first industry insider to blog about drug discovery↗︎. Hosted first by Corante and later by Science↗︎, it was drawing 15,000 to 20,000 page views on a typical weekday by 2010↗︎ and has never stopped. Some posts have escaped the field entirely, most famously the Things I Won’t Work With series↗︎, but the core has stayed the same: one voice, writing several times a week for more than two decades about whatever the industry was going through, with every post dated and tagged by topic↗︎. Read end to end, it is a longitudinal study of drug discovery with a sample size of one.
\n\n\n“If you want to know why your prescriptions cost so much, it’s me↗︎.”
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We collected every post from the archive on science.org: 4,973 posts, 31,624 paragraphs, and close to 3.5 million words, more than 200 posts a year since 2002. Each post carries the category the blog itself assigns, from Business and Markets to Alzheimer’s Disease. The cover is a map of that archive: every paragraph was embedded with a text embedding model and projected to two dimensions with UMAP↗︎, so paragraphs about similar things land near each other, and color marks the topic of the post. The Covid-19 posts form their own island on the right, Alzheimer’s and aging sit together on a peninsula, and the thin streak at the bottom is the blog’s housekeeping notes.
\n\n\n“Sulfur smells like Satan’s socks, and it’s vital↗︎.”
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\nThe clearest trend in the archive is the slow retreat of business. In the mid-2000s, Business and Markets was the largest topic by a wide margin, and for good reason: those were the years of the Vioxx withdrawal↗︎, of Pfizer absorbing Wyeth↗︎ and Merck absorbing Schering-Plough, and of round after round of layoffs and site closures that Lowe covered as they happened to people he knew↗︎. By the most recent years it had shrunk to a sliver. In its place came Chemical News and Biological News, as the blog shifted from reporting on what companies were doing to reporting on what the science was finding. Whether that reflects a change in the industry or in the author, and it is probably both, the blog reads today as a science publication in a way it did not in 2005.
\nThe other unmistakable feature is 2020. Covid-19 went from nothing to close to half of the blog in a single year, stayed there the year after, and then fell back to a trickle, pushing business, cancer, and chemistry coverage to their lowest shares in years before they recovered. It is the closest thing the archive has to a natural experiment in what happens when one topic consumes an entire field.
\n![\"diseases-over-time\"](\"/f4d5f24f549e332f49621bdf484b5995/diseases-over-time.svg\")
\nDisease areas tell a quieter story. Cancer is the constant, present throughout and peaking as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T moved into the clinic. Cardiovascular disease was a bigger share of the blog in the 2000s than at any point since, tracking the era of torcetrapib, Vytorin, and the last big statin trials. Alzheimer’s roughly doubled over the years of the amyloid trials, bacteria and antibiotics show the sharpest sustained rise of any area as resistance and the economics of antibacterial development became recurring subjects, and obesity, quiet for two decades, jumps at the end as the GLP-1 drugs arrive. Taken together, the panels show a writer whose attention follows the clinic.
\n![\"modalities-over-time\"](\"/d213ec4f5e98a13729fbe013e808a8b9/modalities-over-time.svg\")
\nModalities are where the archive records the industry changing shape. Small molecules, the author’s own trade, appear in a growing share of posts over time, because they became something to argue about once they stopped being the default (see question three below). Antibodies rose in parallel, with a spike in 2020 when they were briefly the most discussed thing in the world, and mRNA was effectively absent before the pandemic. The more interesting panels are the ones that start at zero: covalent drugs appear around 2012, gene editing in 2017, and protein degraders in 2018, so the archive records the arrival of three modalities that did not exist as categories when it began. Peptides, steady for two decades, jump in 2024 as the GLP-1 drugs take over the conversation.
\n![\"companies-over-time\"](\"/e603c658efb7a30ff4d26150d7d9e2e0/companies-over-time.svg\")
\nCompanies come and go from the archive the way they come and go from the industry. Aventis, Schering-Plough, and Wyeth sit at the top because they stopped existing, absorbed into Sanofi, Merck, and Pfizer before 2010. Pfizer and Merck run the full width of the chart, mentioned in 317 and 251 posts, and their brightest cells mark the events that defined them for this author: Merck’s peak in 2005 is the Vioxx aftermath, and Pfizer’s in 2021 is the year it delivered both a vaccine and Paxlovid. The bottom rows belong to the pandemic. Moderna and BioNTech light up in 2020 and 2021 after barely existing in the archive before, AstraZeneca’s brightest year is 2020, when its vaccine rather than its oncology pipeline was the story, and Biogen’s peak in 2021 is Aduhelm.
\n![\"knowledge-graph\"](\"/c8f9901c9609d69ee12b084c08fd4dd7/knowledge-graph.svg\")
\nCounting mentions one at a time misses how subjects travel together, so we also built a knowledge graph of the archive. Each node is a term from the analyses above, and two nodes are connected when they appear in the same posts more often than their individual frequencies would predict. Community detection on that network recovers five neighborhoods that anyone who reads the blog will recognize: bench chemistry on one side, where synthesis, screening, fragments, and small molecules link to each other and to the computational tools that serve them; big pharma business on the other, where the large companies connect through mergers, layoffs, and, tellingly, cardiovascular disease, the therapeutic area most bound up with blockbuster economics; the clinic and its regulator in between, the densest cluster in the graph; science and publishing around academia, patents, reproducibility, and fraud; and a fifth community, vaccines and infection, that barely existed before 2020 and now holds antibodies, mRNA, and Moderna.
\n\n\n“And then you have the central nervous system, which can seem like a black box that was dropped into the Marianas Trench↗︎.”
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The structure says something about how a medicinal chemist sees the field. Clinical trials and the FDA are the hub through which chemistry connects to business, which is as it should be, since trials are where compounds become drugs or fail to. Machine learning and docking attach to bench chemistry rather than to the clinic, matching the author’s long-held view that computation helps most on well-bounded problems close to the molecule.
\nThe archive can be mapped, but it can also be asked. For each question below, the paragraphs closest to it were retrieved and handed to a language model with instructions to answer in the author’s voice and to cite the post behind every claim. The figure shows what that retrieval looks like: each query sits as a cross on the same map as the cover, and the paragraphs used to answer it light up around it.
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