Sure, the world is complicated, but not as complicated as you might think. It turns out that most organic molecules-the kind of chemicals that make food tasty, perfumes fragrant, and life alive-derive from a few relatively simple architectures. Together with a bunch of data-minded colleagues, Alan Lipkus of the Chemical Abstracts Service took a deep dive into his organization's century-old library of 24 million organic compounds-most of them synthetic. They found that more than half are built from iust 143 basic shapes, or "frameworks."
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