C&EN talks with Robert Cichewicz, natural products chemist

Abstract

It pains Robert Cichewicz to admit it, but as a college student, he found chemistry classes boring—full of rote memorization about reactions and reagents that seemed to have little applicability to his life. His first research endeavor as an undergraduate was in anthropology: he investigated the role of chili peppers in Mesoamerican culture, history, and medicine. That sparked a lifelong interest in plants and, ultimately, the compounds they produce. Today, while his interest in botany remains, Cichewicz has made a name for himself as a natural products chemist who searches off the beaten path for interesting structures and potential uses for them. When Cichewicz, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, became interested in natural products present in the microbiome, he looked not to humans but to other mammals, collecting microbes from roadkill that he and his students gathered. After noticing that standard fungal culture techniques tended to yield the