Scripps Recruits Coveted Chemist : Science: An MIT professor acclaimed for medicine-related research will take an endowed chair in Research Institute’s new chemistry department.
Moving aggressively to buttress a chemistry department that is just a year old, the Scripps Research Institute has hired a world-renowned chemist for an endowed research chair.
K. Barry Sharpless, 49, will be trading an endowed professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the position in La Jolla.
“This is a major achievement for us,” said an exultant department chairman, K.C. Nicolaou. “He is a genius at discovering new reagents and reaction processes useful to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, as well as to other researchers in chemistry and biology.”
Scripps received a $2.9-million grant in December to establish the chair that Sharpless will hold, the W. M. Keck Foundation Chair in Chemistry. The Keck foundation, funded with the bequest of the late oilman William Myron Keck, is based in Los Angeles. One of its best-known recent gifts was a $70-million donation for a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory in Hawaii.
Sharpless will not move to San Diego until next spring, when Scripps can locate him in temporary quarters while a new chemistry building is being constructed.
The appointment brings to four the number of professors in the new department and is being portrayed by Scripps as a crucial step toward gaining the new department a reputation as a leading center for bio-organic chemistry, just a year after being established, Nicolaou said.
The achievement is impressive, said Mark Wrighton, chairman of the MIT chemistry department that Sharpless will be leaving.
“It’s a remarkable achievement in a short period of time,” Wrighton said. “I think Dr. (Richard) Lerner, (president of the institute), is to be congratulated upon assembling this group. It’s really remarkable progress.”
He added, though, that Scripps clearly is taking a very narrow field within chemistry in which to specialize--the field that is developing new techniques to build the “designer drugs” that scientists are dreaming up on supercomputers.
“The breadth of activities is still modest in comparison to the leading departments. So I regard it as a collection of truly super people, but in only one part of chemistry,” Wrighton said.
More than two years ago, Scripps embarked on a program to add chemists to its research staff. Although officials emphasize that Scripps still will do basic research, the new chemists will also make the institute more likely to develop new drugs or other products to which Scripps would have lucrative patent rights.
One more professor remains to be hired before all five professorships in the department will be filled, Nicolaou said.
Sharpless is widely regarded for his work in finding new ways to synthesize organic molecules using metallic compounds, said department chairman K. C. Nicolaou.
In 1980, Sharpless invented a process for using asymmetric metallic molecules to force oxygen atoms to bind to organic molecules in a particular three-dimensional orientation.
Normally, the oxygen atoms can bind to a pair of carbon atoms in two different ways, known as “right-handed” or “left-handed” isomers.
(In the drug or nutritional store, consumers see examples of this in amino acid supplements such as lysine, often seen labeled as L-lysine. The right-handed form would be R-lysine.)
Sharpless’s method assures that all the molecules in a chemical batch will be purely of the same handedness. The handedness of organic molecules is significant because the human body generally uses only one isomer of a compound, so pharmaceuticals must be given only in that form.
Currently, pharmaceuticals are first synthesized and then purified, but Sharpless’s method eventually could eliminate the need for a purification step, Nicolaou said.
Meanwhile, it is fundamental to much of the synthetic organic chemistry being done in research laboratories today, he added.
Elected in 1985 to the National Academy of Sciences, Sharpless did his graduate work at Stanford University, and postdoctoral work at Stanford and at Harvard University. He has been at MIT since 1970, except for 1977-80 when he was a chemistry professor at Stanford.
Two years ago, he spent three months at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which offered him a permanent post that he turned down, said his wife, Jan Sharpless.
