Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine . All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

I wanted to let everyone know that my first venture into between-hard-covers authorship, The Chemistry Book , is now set to be released in early February, and it’s available to pre-order on Amazon. This, like the other books in the series (such as The Physics Book , by Clifford Pickover) is a survey of 250 events, concepts, and discoveries in the field, from prehistory to today. The only problem was that there could easily be 250 more entries!

The choice of topics was up to me, and I certainly incorporated some of the suggestions made here. Some of them I already had on the list when that post was written, and I was glad to see them confirmed, while others sent me off into some areas that I hadn’t known about at all. And while I certainly enjoyed writing it; I can see where doing that for a living might get wearing after a while. (Says the guy who posts 3000 words a week on his blog for free. . .!)

I believe that you can look inside it at some of the pages – the format of the series is a short essay and a full-page illustration per entry. I can tell you, some of the illustration choices were challenging, but I think everything came out well. Fame and fortune! Surely everyone must know thirty or forty people who don’t know enough about chemistry, right?