One Tuesday morning this past January, So Young Lee walked into a lab on the fourth floor of Building 18 and discovered that her equipment had exploded. It was a minor explosion—thankfully, no one was hurt—but the chemical she had painstakingly made had splattered all over the walls, the ceiling, and the broken shards of the glass tube that once contained it. This incident would cost her time and precious product—and she didn’t have the time to lose.
Lee, a fourth-year PhD student in chemical biology, was partway through a three-week, 11-step process to synthesize a chemical she helped design: azido-(Z,Z)-farnesyl phosphoryl-ß-D-mannose, or AzFPM for short. Meant to help combat the tuberculosis bacterium, which kills more people each year than any other pathogen, AzFPM is the first molecule to target a specific carbohydrate in the bacterium’s cell wall that helps it evade the immune system. The molecule is designed to sneak inside tuberculosis, potentially offering scientists and pharmaceutical companies a new tool for studying the pathogen at a time when it is steadily gaining antibacterial resistance.
But making AzFPM isn’t easy. Producing just a few milligrams takes weeks of patiently heating, purifying, and combining chemicals at just the right ratios and timing. So when Lee saw that a vacuum suction machine with a hairline crack had sent her invention flying, she put on PPE, stood on a stool, and began mopping up every last drop with a paper towel.
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