Playing Chess with Nature

Whatever glamour there is these days in organic chemistry -- the study of the complex, carbon-based molecules that are the basis of life -- adheres mostly to the genetic engineers, those futuristic scientists who turn living cells into tiny factories for drugs and other substances. But the fact is that most pharmaceutically useful compounds are made the old-fashioned way, by combining reagents in a laboratory flask. Last week the Royal Swedish Academy returned to the roots of the science. Elias James Corey, 62, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is an organic chemist's chemist, a master of the art of making biological molecules one painstaking step at a time.

In a long career at Harvard, Corey and his students have synthesized some 100 important drugs and natural substances, including the hormone-like prostaglandins used both to treat infertility and to induce abortions. Two years ago, his group synthesized the active substance in a Chinese folk medicine, taken from the ginkgo tree, that is now widely administered as a treatment for asthma and circulation disorders. But he was also honored last week for a broader intellectual achievement: pioneering "retrosynthetic analysis," an approach to building molecules that Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel- winning chemist himself, likens to a chess game with nature.

Corey taught a generation of chemists to think like those chess masters who start with their vision of a winning board position and then work backward. His method for breaking down compounds, bond by bond, into smaller and smaller components is so rigorously logical that it can be taught to a computer, although Corey says it will be some time before chemistry has the equivalent of a computerized Kasparov.