"Organic chemistry mainly deals with carbon compounds. Many students view this as a formidable subject, however, if you know well about only four elements: Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, you can comprehend 90% of organic chemistry."

Group Leader HONG Sung-Woo, of the IBS Center for Catalytic Hydrocarbon Functionalizations and KAIST professor, gave a lecture on August 16 at the auditorium of IBS. It was titled "New Drug Discovery: Assemble Reactions like Lego Blocks by Employing a Catalyst". The content could be hard for 30 middle school participants to digest but they concentrated on the lecture as if they were chemistry majors.

▲ Group Leader Hong delivering a lecture

This lecture was part of "Junior Doctor", a program to explain the basics of science & technology and to promote interest in the field among teenagers who dream of becoming a scientist. The 9^th Junior Doctor event took place over four weeks from July 25 to August 20 with 34 institutions participating including government-funded research institutes, universities and private institutes.

It was the first time IBS has taken part in the Junior Doctor program and three IBS researchers presented a series of engaging lectures. Hong’s first lecture on August 16 led to the seamless introduction of "What Makes up our World?" by Research Fellow KIM Young-Im of the IBS Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research. Research Fellow KIM Sang-Gyu of the IBS Center for Genome Engineering concluded the series, on August 18, with his lecture "Botanists in the Desert".

Hong opened his lecture by saying, "Simply put, organic chemistry is a discipline to study life and materials." He went on to explain the discovery of new drugs from natural products through examples like aspirin, morphine and heroin. He also introduced the so-called "Lego chemistry", an approach to design drugs in the same way we build Lego blocks using fragment-based design. He presented two cases of Lego chemistry: The development of Tamiflu, an antiviral medication used to treat influenza, and Gleevec, a drug to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia.

After the lecture, participants showed interest in new drug discovery and related fields, saying it was useful to learn about science that is different from the way in which it is taught at schools. IBS officials commented: "We hope these lectures can serve as opportunities for teenagers to pay more attention to basic science and to contribute to Korea’s scientific development in the future."

▲ A participant deep in concentration