Last week I had the pleasure of attending a science-themed quiz hosted by communications consultancy College Hill Life Sciences.
And, my, the questions were fiendish. The photo shows perhaps the easiest round. Despite holding degrees in chemistry and molecular biology, working for a time in a crystallography lab, and editing a text book on protein structure, I struggled on a few of these. See how many you can get—and let me know if you can’t read any of the text.
Questions copyright Mike Ward and John Hodgson, reproduced with permission.
I’ll kick off: 75 = Haemoglobin – one of my all time favorites…
71 is penicillin (is that a lactam ring I see before me?)
72 is either ethyl alcohol or a dachshund.
79 is ascorbic acid (vitamin C)
I got 79 from the a-Pauling clue.
78 = aspirin (my body knows too well)
I only submitted one answer to gamely leave the field open for others but, since Henry has been such a clever-crocs (!), I’ll chip in another: The CPK model in 73 is Zantac.
Corey! Koltan a-Pauling pun Bob!
What does the text on 76 say?
76 say “Only useful for her too”. Hint, there may be a bad pub in there.
Ah – then I presume 76 is herceptin.
Clearly not too many moleculaholics in this neck of the woods. And I thought I had left out some juicy bait for Henry and Bob. Seems it may have gone all frustular and lost its scent…?
Spare me, I am but an ‘umble palaeontologist.
72 is a dachshund and 74 is Babe
Henry – actually I was impressed! I had blithely assumed than nothing smaller than a mastodon came within your purview ...;-)
Yeah, well, they did blow those molecules up so you could actually see ‘em.
79 is a giraffe
On a unicycle. That’s that 5-membered
uniheterocycle, at the bottom80 is taxol I guess. Hard to tell from the picture but another yew-sless pun. 77 has goe me stumped. I could cheat I guess and search for it. Some sort of kinase inhibitor? And I can’t really see 74 at all but presumably another protein drug?
77 is a purine of some sort. 74 is a drug that went to market but got withdrawn. Vioxx?
Sure its a purine derivative but with some sort of weird ethylene glycol on it? Its almost as though half a ribose is missing? I don’t get the picture for 74 at all. Seems to be a small protein plus some funny space filling model. Clues Matt?
Does this help?
Clue for 77 – the ‘crash helmet’ refers to a piece of headgear worn by a lady in a UK television commercial for this product.
Well, um, 74’s a protein. Is there a PSE disease?
Living in foreign parts as I do, I’ll have to leave 77 to someone else.
Google: crash helmet advert. Ans: 77 = zovirax. That initial initial clue was rather obscure…!
Still stuck on 74 – not recombinant insulin. I blame the photographer…
Is 74 maybe that antibody based drug associated with the ‘elephant men’ drug testing fiasco? Can’t remember the name. The two structures shown (spacefill and ribbon) seem to be two representations of the same thing which suggests to me that someone cut and pasted it from somewhere.
I ended up cheating on 77 (did a PubChem structure search)and got no exact matches so I’m giving up on that one.
d’oh read the comment above Neylon!
Thanks for the blow-up
dollphoto Matt.The image on the right looks similar to a diseased state Prion (PrPd) – not sure about the L image.
Unlike BSE (moo), I’m not aware of any oink related aspect to TSE’s so we can rule out PSE Bob!! (I should know since this remains a research field that I follow).
Foot and Mouth disease type protein maybe? I could cheat and “phone a friend” at
DVLAthe VLA but can’t be arsed.The (gammon) steaks are raised on 74 !!
Cameron/Graham – doesn’t look like an antibody or an FMDV protein to me (and I’ve seen a few of the latter in my time...)
Matt – are the two molecules different views of the same thing or two proteins that interact? Even then, I think we need another clue…
74 would be insulin
Well done! I had dismissed insulin because it just didn’t look like it to me – the right hand image doesn’t give much of an impression of a hexamer. Not a Platonic notion of one anyhow! ;-)
Come to think of it, I was looking at a molecule of insulin only yesterday. This is what it looked like (or part of it at least):
You can see why I was confused…!
Well done everyone, that’s all of them.
I’ll have another quiz for you later today.
Thanks Quizmaster ”Come on Down Brown”