Freeing radicals from their negative connotations
For biochemist JoAnne Stubbe, “radical” is a word with many associations. In the late 1960s, Stubbe was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, where student demonstrators picketed against the Vietnam War. She recalls that at the time, radicals were seen as protestors who were “highly reactive, that one had difficulty controlling, and that wreaked havoc on everything they interacted with.”But from Stubbe’s perspective, the “radicals” were merely reacting to their immediate environment — namely, the lines of policemen sent to quell the protests, “guns raised, masks on.” “Little did I think that these experiences back in those days would foreshadow the fact that I have spent 30 years of my life working on radicals in biology,” said Stubbe, who spoke at MIT’s Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture on Tuesday.Stubbe, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Biology, has devoted most of her career to elucidating the mechanisms...