"My name is Paresma Patel, I actually go by Pinky, and right now we're in the labs at
NCATS and the chemistry lab in Rockville, Maryland.
So I'm actually working on a disease right now we're developing some molecules that could
be of interest for Fibrodisplasia Ossificans Progresiva, which is a rare genetic disease.
I would say growing up I honestly wanted to be everything from an artist to a lawyer to
a doctor so, I've had a breadth of interests over when I was growing up.
I really did not enjoy my first chemistry class.
It was a huge class, it was General Chemistry One, it was 8 o'clock in the morning there
were 250 students and the professor just put up transparency after transparency of chemical
equations, and I just couldn't understand how I would ever use this stuff.
And I spent some time at a small pharmaceutical company and it was that time where I actually
was involved in drug discovery in medicinal chemistry and applying organic chemistry to
making molecules that were useful to medicine and to solving biological problems.
You know, I only spent a little bit of time doing that but that's how I knew I really
liked this application of organic chemistry to medicine and that's what I wanted to do.
You do hear a lot of adages about don't trust a chemist that can't cook because a lot of
what we do is so similar.
First you have to have an idea of what you're gonna make, you read a recipe to decide how
you're gonna make it, you gather all the ingredients that you're gonna need and you mix them together
and you make your end product.
So similarly with chemistry it's a similar path so I start off by designing an experiment,
making a really specific molecule that I'm interested in.
And so in order to do that I have to do research and read a procedure and the literature, and
based on what that procedure said I actually gather all the starting chemicals that I'll
need.
And as chemists we spend a lot of time actually going through this mixture that we have in
a flask and trying to separate the things we want from the things we don't want.
And then once we've done that either it could be a home run and, you know, it worked the
first time or it could be a procedure that needs modification so I might need to change
and tweak a few things so I can do it again, or I might just have to move on to something
else.
And in the end we spend a lot of times trying to figure out if we made what we wanted to
make, whether we can make use of what we have.
Sometimes when we run chemist we're running chemical reactions we need these reactions
to actually be very cold, and so when you make a bath of dry ice, and in this case we're
using acetone as the solvent, it actually cools the flask to minus 78 degrees.
And so that allows us to run reactions under very cold temperatures and a lot of chemical
reactions you have to keep the reaction very cold so the chemicals that you're using don't
decompose while you're running your reaction.
So in this case I'm just cooling down my flask before I add the chemicals to actually run
the reaction.
It's those small, small steps of when I kinda have an idea that I hadn't had before, or
when something really works, that keeps me going, and to be able to build upon that.
If you're making an antibiotic compound for example, just testing it to see whether it
kills bacteria, those are short-term effects that you learn from and you actually can develop
into something more interesting down the line.
For me it would be exciting to for it to be something that affects patients in the end.
I'm actually somebody who is a people person, I think science is much more useful if you're
interactive with people.
speaker 1: All right are you drawing the quinoline starring material?
speaker 2: Maybe, maybe we can start with this quinoline and then we can do a displacement
maybe with an aniline.
There's a lot out there and the more you're communicating with people.
speaker 1: I don't know if this is gonna work.
speaker 2: Well that's the whole purpose.
The better of a scientist you're gonna be.
Science is a career where there are a lot of times where failure is part of it.
You learn from the failures, don't let other people discourage you if it's something that
you want.
It's possible and you just have to put your full heart into it."