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Carbohydrates may be familiar as the stuff of which pre-marathon meals are made, but chemistry is only now determining their role in the human body. Columbia chemist Samuel Danishefsky's pioneering work on these sugars has brought him two prizes from his peers in organic chemistry.
Danishefsky accepted the Tetrahedron Prize, which includes a medal and $10,000, Sept. 17 in Chicago; the prize is named for the British journals Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters and is awarded by their editors "for outstanding creativity in organic chemistry." In the Aug. 26 issue of its journal, Chemical and Engineering News, the American Chemical Society announced it would award Danishefsky its Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry at its annual spring meeting April 15 in San Francisco.
"He's intensely focused on his own research, but he retains an enormous amount of time to mentor students and even colleagues," said Harry Wasserman, professor emeritus of organic chemistry at Yale, the American editor of both Tetrahedron publications and a former colleague of Danishefsky's. "He's a rare person in that sense."
In the last 10 years, Danishefsky has developed a building-block approach to carbohydrate synthesis, using glycals, carbon rings with one oxygen atom, as the basic unit to build oligosaccarides, very complex carbohydrates, and glycopeptides, carbohydrates attached to peptides. Such molecules might some day play a role in directing the immune system to specific antigens and the work may eventually allow scientists to turn on the process at will.
"These awards are meaningful to me because they are decided by senior organic chemists," Danishefsky said. "They are like family."
In addition to his post as professor of chemistry at Columbia, Danishefsky holds the Eugene W. Kettering Chair and directs the Laboratory for Bioorganic Chemistry at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He is a graduate of Yeshiva and Harvard and resides in Englewood, N.J.
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