Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2010 - (Page 8)

in my own words Big Innovations at the Nanoscale CAROLYN BERTOZZI, PhD T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley In June 2010, chemical biologist Carolyn Bertozzi became the ﬁrst woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Prize, a $500,000 award sometimes called the Oscar for Inventors. Much of her pioneering work has focused on glycans, sugars on the surface of cells, but her innovations also include tools for labeling molecules inside living cells, a method for developing novel protein drugs, and a nanoscale device that can inject molecules into a cell without damaging it. Bertozzi is Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and a founder of Redwood Biosciences. Her other awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Science, and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award. Organic chemistry: a love story At Harvard, you have to declare your major at the end of freshman year. I declared biology. I liked it in high school, I found it interesting, and I thought I might want to go to medical school. In my sophomore year, I took Organic Chemistry, a required course with a reputation of being a weeder class for pre-meds. I had very low expectations for that class going into it, but I ended up falling in love with it. Before that, the chemistry courses I had taken were more like Physical Chemistry, which I found a little abstract. It was hard for me to visualize it and understand it in the physical sense. But Organic Chemistry was all about drawing pictures. You would learn a few fundamental principles about how molecules behave, and then, because you could see it, you could predict how all the rest of the molecules were going to behave. I loved the visual aspect of it. I switched my major to chemistry. how much I had to learn. But that was why I chose that lab: it gave me firsthand experience trying to study the biology of sugars. I saw how difficult it is and that it really requires chemical tools. But you don’t know what tools are needed until you’re trying to work without them. That eventually became the theme of my lab: developing chemical tools to help biologists study sugars, and then using those tools ourselves for our own biological studies. Who’s afraid of glycobiology? The experimental tools that make biology research so much faster and easier now than it was 40 years ago—all the tools of genetics and molecular biology—don’t help much when you’re studying sugars. A lot of the most powerful tools are chemical tools, which makes glycobiology—the study of sugars—a field in which a chemist has a unique advantage. Not many biologists are comfortable with this level of chemistry, but if they want to study sugars, they have to learn how to use chemical tools. It takes a really bold, fearless biologist to study sugars. There are maybe a few hundred of them. The bottom line is that the field is still small. A lot of biologists—even famous people with Nobel Prizes—don’t know much about it. There is still a lot of room for growth. The tool maker When I started my PhD and I was working on chemical synthesis of sugars, I learned about their biology by reading literature, but I wasn’t doing any biology myself. Then I did a post-doc in a cell biology lab where nobody knew any chemistry. I was totally immersed in biology, and I realized 8 imagine Sept/Oct 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2010

Imagine Magazine - John Hopkins - September/October 2010
Contents
Big Questions
Big Picture
In My Own Words
Biotechnology is
A Survival Guide for the Biotech Revolution
The Indiana Jones of Biotech
Stemming the Monster
Transgenic Animals
Building a Better Hydrogel
Immortal Cells & Bioethics
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Nights at the Museum
One Step Ahead
Middle Ground
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - September/October 2010