In high school in Bangalore, India, Kartik Chandran did some admittedly crazy experiments with his fellow chemistry club members, including distilling nitric acid to make explosive guncotton (nitrocellulose), which they used to blow up a Coke can. “The chemistry club was really adventurous,” he recalls. “The safety standards [in Indian high schools] are not what they are here” in the United States.
Wanting to learn more about chemistry, Kartik applied for and received a full scholarship to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Getting an advanced science degree “is really difficult in India,” he says. “If I stayed in India, it wouldn’t work out."
METHODS: After college Chandran joined virologist Max Nibert’s lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he dove into the study of how mammalian reoviruses enter host cells. The viruses were known to be taken up into a cell’s endosomes, but such compartments were typically thought of as ...
