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Q&A with Professor Cameron Alexander

How did you first become interested in chemistry? 

A friend at home had a chemistry set, and we just played around with whatever was left after he had had a first go. I seem to recall setting fire to magnesium ribbon then mixing pretty much everything else in the set, without reading the instructions.... I wasn't hot on following Materials and Methods, or COSHH, in those days.... I liked chemistry at school and then for a year before starting university, I worked at what was then Ciba-Geigy Plastics, as a temporary research technician. This was my first encounter with polymer chemistry, and I enjoyed this so much that I started thinking about research as a career. Of course I had no real career plan as such, but after my degree I stayed on for PhD studies and have stayed in chemistry ever since...

 Tell us about somebody who has inspired or mentored you in your career.

I have been lucky to work with many, many inspiring people and teams in my career, and selecting from this list is difficult. However, I can highlight my PhD supervisor at Durham, Professor Jim Feast, as the biggest individual influence on my career. Not only is Jim an outstanding scientist, he is also a great advocate for chemistry and has been a brilliant mentor and supporter of scientists in his team.

I will never forget a group meeting early on in my PhD when Jim asked me to critique a paper. He asked me what the most important data in the paper were, and I started by saying "in the results, the authors say that..." at which point Jim interrupted and said "Cameron, I have read the paper and know what the authors think – I want to know what you think". This forced me to analyse the data more carefully, come up with evidence to support my assertions, and made me think more carefully about all that I read, not just in science, but in the rest of my life. Jim's brilliant and innovative thinking, combined with a wit and a sense of doing what is right, not what is easy, has been a strong motivator for me.

What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry? 

Go and do it! Although I am in a school of pharmacy, and much of my team's research deals with biology and medicine questions, it is chemistry which is the central discipline underlying all that we do. ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº provides you with the fundamental knowledge upon which you can build any scientific career, and can challenge you to think critically and also creatively. When you synthesise a molecule in the lab, there is a chance that no one has made the exact same compound before, and if it is a particularly complex structure, it might not exist anywhere else in the universe. What other career can give you that?

Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about? 

There is a real chance that personalised therapies for currently untreatable cancers will be available in the near future. It is now possible to sequence a patient's tumour in real time, then design multiple RNA sequences which can direct a patient's immune system to attack those tumours, then synthesise and package all those sequences into a patient-specific formulation in a hospital setting. The formulations can be altered as the patient's disease status changes, meaning that disease-adaptive therapies can be given. Of course there are multiple hurdles on the way, not least how we test these new medicines when there is no simple 'control group' and how we might pay for it in an already financially strained healthcare system. However the science is nearly there, and it is all underpinned by chemistry.

How are the chemical sciences making the world a better place? 

In addition to the obvious contributions of chemistry in disease prevention by vaccines and treatment by medicines, I can see chemists making real advances in solar power, sustainable materials and synthetic biology (which I think of as a sub-set of chemistry). The ability to harness solar energy will transform how we live, and the ways in which we make and reuse building blocks for materials are also seeing rapid developments.

In the polymer field, we have learnt how to make materials from monomers very effectively, and now polymer chemists are showing how we can reverse those reactions very efficiently too. A spin-out from this already emerging is the field of sequence-defined synthetic polymers for information storage. If we can learn to read those sequences as efficiently as nature does for nucleic acids, then we have entirely new computation...