Martin Burke: The smart synthesizer

In November 1998, Martin Burke was on his first clinical rotation in the MD/PhD program at Harvard Medical School when he met a 22-year-old cystic fibrosis patient who was taking 17 different medications. Knowing that a single missing chloride channel causes the disease, it bothered Burke that the treatment comprised such a large cocktail of drugs. It struck him immediately that science might be able to replace the missing ion channel in the same way that a prosthetic limb replaces a lost leg. "I wanted to develop prostheses on the molecular scale," he says.