"What I seek to do is harness the inspirations of nature, funnel that energy into ways to make molecules in the lab, harvest those methods along the way and develop them into something useful for the synthesis of drugs, the curing of diseases," said Baran, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.
At age 25, Baran already has a remarkable achievement on his record: While in graduate school at Scripps Research Institute, he and his adviser K.C. Nicolaou led the team that was the first in the world to synthesize a set of highly complicated compounds called CP molecules. The compounds, extracted from a species of juniper, showed potential as cholesterol-lowering and possibly anti-cancer drugs.
Nicolaou and Baran were just one of several research groups internationally who raced to synthesize CP molecules. The difficulty was not just the "diabolical architecture" of their structures, as Nicolaou described them, but the laboratory methods to make them -- let alone make them with simple, easily obtainable starting materials -- simply didn't exist in the late 1990s.
Baran "is blessed with a towering intellect, and unparalleled imagination and originality," wrote Nicolaou to nominate him for the award. "Wave after wave his ideas were tried by him in the laboratory until the molecules gave in!"
Learning how to synthesize a natural product helps scientists understand how it works, and thus how to simplify or improve it. In this case came an added bonus: Many of the smaller discoveries along the way have led to other new techniques and tools to make molecules.
"To me, organic chemistry is like a combination of artist and astronaut," Baran explained. "An artist, because you can create anything you like and the project is a blank canvas, and an astronaut for the ability to go where no man has gone before."
Baran received his undergraduate degree from New York University in 1997 and his Ph.D. from Scripps Research Institute in 2001. He is a member of the ACS division of organic chemistry.
The Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry, shared by both graduate student and his or her adviser, is sponsored by Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc.