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Battling disease with silicon drugs

Big discoveries are rare in research labs. Most of the time, scientists have to try over and over again to achieve the effect they want. Drugs are especially tricky, since even effective drugs can have toxic side effects. Fiddling with the molecular structure can improve a drugâ??or make it worse. Up until now, those attempts to tweak existing drugs focused on the carbon chemistry of medicine. Like humans, medicines are made up mostly of carbon.