Abstract
It is a great privilege to contribute to the Reflections essays. In my particular case, this essay has allowed me to weave some of my major scientific contributions into a tapestry held together by what I have learned from three colleagues (Robert Letsinger, Gobind Khorana, and George Rathmann) who molded my career at every important junction. To these individuals, I remain eternally grateful, as they always led by example and showed many of us how to break new ground in both science and biotechnology. Relative to my scientific career, I have focused primarily on two related areas. The first is methodologies we developed for chemically synthesizing DNA and RNA. Synthetic DNA and RNA continue to be an essential research tool for biologists, biochemists, and molecular biologists. The second is developing new approaches for solving important biological problems using synthetic DNA, RNA, and their analogs.
Highlights
The excitement of learning about biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on, has always been part of my life
About one month later, our celebrations of this momentous event quickly turned to disappointment, as Robert Merrifield published his tetrapeptide synthesis, on polystyrene, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society [1]. (Neither knew that the other had embarked on the development of this concept.) The major difference between the two approaches was the direction of peptide synthesis and, the choice of protecting groups
The research constituted a major breakthrough in this field, as it laid the foundation for a new oligonucleotide synthesis strategy that later became known as the phosphotriester method (3–5 nucleotides in length)
Summary
The excitement of learning about biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on, has always been part of my life. This procedure remained the method of choice for synthesizing both RNA and DNA until many years later, when my laboratory introduced 2Ј-deoxynucleoside 3Ј-phosphoramidites as synthons for DNA synthesis.
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