Brilliant 10: The Chemical Mechanic
Attaching fluorines to medicine makes it more effective After 1,200 unsuccessful attempts to do something, most people would call it quits. Not Harvard University chemist Tobias Ritter. Chemistry research is 90 percent failure, he says. But success, when it comes, can be big. In Ritter's case, it could mean more-effective drugs. Ritter, a native of Germany, had been studying fluorination, the process by which fluorine atoms bind to carbon, since 2007. Drug manufacturers had long known that fluorine could make their products more stable, potent and penetrating, but the standard methods for attaching fluorines were unreliable and, more often than not, would damage the drugs. Finding a better fluorination technique is one of the more difficult challenges in modern medicine, says Robert Grubbs, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at Caltech. But Ritter kept at it. One good way to attach fluorines to an organic compound is by using a catalyst. Ritter and his...