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The Daily OrangeSci-Tech's Secret
Tucked away in an SU chemistry lab, Professor Robert Doyle works to change modern chemistry
By Andy McCullough
Posted: 11/13/07, 12:19 AM EST Section: News
"I guess that's what will take our lives over for the next few years, the next three or four years. So I guess we'll see how it goes."
So maybe Doyle is meeting with the university's lawyers. He could be discussing the pharmaceutical companies SU might partner with to increase the project's resources.
Or maybe he's stuck in the lab, working with his team of 12 graduate and undergraduate chemistry students to adjust the derivatives of the lead compound, tweaking the different combinations of elements in search of the right match.
Or maybe he just forgot.
"He loves his work," Fairchild said. "So, what'll happen is, his work will become his passion. So all of a sudden, that means everything's 110 percent. You basically get going with everything. That's pretty much how his lab is at the moment."
Outside his lab, testaments hang to Doyle and his team's work. Head down a flight of stairs from his office, past a diorama of the periodic table - a Coke can for sodium, a pocket calculator for arsenic, a Centrum bottle for zinc - past safety shower handles that hang from the ceiling like giant can openers.
Taped to the wall, in between posters of Doyle's other research - crystals, cancer treatment drug AZT fused with folic acid - is the group's latest breakthrough.
"Oral Delivery of Insulin Through the Colalamin Uptake Pathway," the poster reads, more than a year of work condensed into a 55-inch-by-35-inch sheet of white paper. Doyle follows three other names on the poster: Amanda Petrus and Tony Vortherms, two of his graduate students, and then Fairchild.
It's work like this that makes Jon Zubieta, chair of the chemistry department, happy.
Few had heard of Doyle when he applied for jobs. But SU's radar dipped low enough to pick him up. Once Doyle had a chance to interview, his enthusiasm and his research proposals impressed Zubieta.
"He didn't come from one of the big East Coast, West Coast universities," Zubieta said. "He did his graduate work in Ireland (at Dublin's Trinity College), then his post-doc in Australia (at The Australian National University) and a second post-doc at Yale.
So maybe Doyle is meeting with the university's lawyers. He could be discussing the pharmaceutical companies SU might partner with to increase the project's resources.
Or maybe he's stuck in the lab, working with his team of 12 graduate and undergraduate chemistry students to adjust the derivatives of the lead compound, tweaking the different combinations of elements in search of the right match.
Or maybe he just forgot.
"He loves his work," Fairchild said. "So, what'll happen is, his work will become his passion. So all of a sudden, that means everything's 110 percent. You basically get going with everything. That's pretty much how his lab is at the moment."
Outside his lab, testaments hang to Doyle and his team's work. Head down a flight of stairs from his office, past a diorama of the periodic table - a Coke can for sodium, a pocket calculator for arsenic, a Centrum bottle for zinc - past safety shower handles that hang from the ceiling like giant can openers.
Taped to the wall, in between posters of Doyle's other research - crystals, cancer treatment drug AZT fused with folic acid - is the group's latest breakthrough.
"Oral Delivery of Insulin Through the Colalamin Uptake Pathway," the poster reads, more than a year of work condensed into a 55-inch-by-35-inch sheet of white paper. Doyle follows three other names on the poster: Amanda Petrus and Tony Vortherms, two of his graduate students, and then Fairchild.
It's work like this that makes Jon Zubieta, chair of the chemistry department, happy.
Few had heard of Doyle when he applied for jobs. But SU's radar dipped low enough to pick him up. Once Doyle had a chance to interview, his enthusiasm and his research proposals impressed Zubieta.
"He didn't come from one of the big East Coast, West Coast universities," Zubieta said. "He did his graduate work in Ireland (at Dublin's Trinity College), then his post-doc in Australia (at The Australian National University) and a second post-doc at Yale.
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