Daily Iowan

Issue date: 4/18/08 Section: Metro

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Chemistry came easily for Martin Mwangi. He didn't put too much thought in it, and he was surprised when he was named "best student" in the subject at his high school in Kenya.

Ten years later, he came to the UI and began work on a Ph.D. project that would change his career. Earlier this month, he and a team of UI scientists presented the findings at the 235th American Chemistry Society National Meeting in New Orleans.

The group developed a method to facilitate the process of making organic molecules.

Traditionally, synthesizing organic molecules was expensive and tedious. Organic products had to be purified and separated from catalysts, which often formed impurities or reacted with each other, before the next step in a long sequence.

Making the anticancer molecule called Taxol required more than 60 steps, for example.

But Mwangi and his colleague, Brett Runge, created a type of polymer tube that separates catalysts from organic products within one container.

The technique, called "pot-in-pot," works like a sieve. The polymer tube, easily made by molding around glass vials or metal rods, allows tiny organic molecules to flow out into the container for the next reaction while keeping catalysts inside.

On April 10, the business and professional magazine Chemistry World featured Mwangi's work. The new method cuts time, cost, and amount of waste produced in synthesis, an attractive package for industry. The Taxol reaction could potentially be cut down to 20 steps, Mwangi said.

"It had a big risk, but the payoff is amazing," he said, now back from the New Orleans conference. His wide cheekbones jutted beneath a baseball cap emblazoned with the words "French Quarter."

He humbly rejected most credit for the project, however. His adviser, Assistant Professor Ned Bowden, was the source of the idea, he said, while he and Runge tackled the problem.

The Bowden lab is hidden behind an oddly blank gray door on the fourth floor of the Chemistry Building. Wedged into a tiny nook is Mwangi's computer, with the considerably tall man folded into a chair in front of it.

From the side of a cabinet, he plucked an old Post-it, on which Bowden had written "I have an idea - Let's talk." The two often brainstormed for hours about various projects.

Continued...

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