I’m still proud of my lab’s early work with circular oligonucleotides. I think we came up with some pretty novel and useful stuff, including methods for making them and strategies for how they can be engineered to bind to RNA or DNA. And although people may be more generally aware of using circular DNAs for DNA amplification (“rolling circle amplification”), they may not know about our “rolling circle transcription” (RCT) work. RCT makes RNA really efficiently and, I think, has been under-utilized. Anyway, since our current research is far removed from this early work, most people don’t know about it.

I might have been a drummer in a mediocre jazz or rock band. I’ve always liked playing music (my father is a musician), and played drums in multiple bands when I was younger. Public gigs can be a lot of fun.

I always wanted to be a scientist – I was a child during the Apollo moon program, which was inspiring. I wasn’t sure which area of science – I was fascinated by it all.

Our field is much more biological than it once was, with cell culture, sequencing, CRISPR, cloning, and animal studies all accepted as part of the work, and publishable in chemistry journals. This didn’t use to be the case – earlier chemists working with DNA initially focused on synthesis and modification chemistry, with maybe a bit of thermodynamics added in. I have really enjoyed learning more biology and medicine as the field has evolved.

I tell them “My lab modifies DNA and RNA for applications in medicine, and I also teach organic chemistry to college students.” I usually don’t get a lot of follow up questions or comments, except from some physicians, who often describe their past trauma of taking organic chemistry in college. I try to avoid inflicting that trauma!

Peer review. Early in my career I found it scary to put my success as an academic in the hands of two anonymous reviewers at every stage, for publication and grants. Over time I’ve mellowed a bit on this!

I would build a team of biologists and chemists with the goal of constructing “enantio-life”. It would be fun, and likely useful as well, to build a living bacterial cell from the ground up, constructed from the mirror image of DNA/RNA/protein/carbohydrate. Actually I think this is likely to happen in the next ten or twenty years anyway without me – people are starting to make real progress in this direction. I’ll be excited to see it become real.

I definitely acknowledge my PhD advisor, the late Ronald Breslow. He was incredibly brilliant, inquisitive and enthusiastic about science. And he provided an exciting lab environment, where I got to meet world-class chemists.