Carolyn Bertozzi, Professor of Chemistry and of Chemical and Systems Biology, Stanford
Chapters:
Listen 0:00 ChEM-H: Educating a new breed of scientists and doctors (6:19)
Listen 6:18 What is the place of chemistry in the 'Century of Biology'? (5:07)
Listen 11:26 A chemistry revival? (6:04)
Listen 17:31 Bioorthogonal chemistry (3:39)
Listen 21:09 ACS Central Science - A new open access journal (5:09)
Classes for the school year begin this week at Stanford University. New to the faculty is Carolyn Bertozzi, an American chemist who made her name across the bay at Berkeley and was wooed to Stanford by a chance to do research and teach chemistry in a new interdisciplinary institute known as ChEM-H. The institute will bring chemists, engineers, biologists and medical doctors together to understand life at a chemical level. We’ve often heard of biology and engineering institutes, or bringing bio and IT. This institute ups the ante and includes chemistry and medicine.
Carolyn is an outspoken scientist who feels that chemistry gets short shrift in a time when biology is considered the queen of the sciences. She points out that the National Insittues of Health tend to be lead and run by biologists. We usually call it biomedical research, not chemical-biomedical research. And yet, she argues, it is chemistry that will give us the answers going forward.
“This is a bit of semantics, but I’d say that what we don’t understand about biology is what happens at the level of molecules. What we don’t understand about biology is the chemistry of it. It is hard to see. You need a different set of tools and technology to see what happens at the molecular scale. And that is the chemistry,” says Carolyn in today’s interview.
Does Carolyn think there’s too much hype around genomics? Would she like to see a revival of chemistry?
As the editor-in-chief of a new open access journal, ACS Central Science, Carolyn will be publishing much more on the topic, making louder and prouder the voice of the chemist.
