Dervan, in his Caltech research laboratory. Photograph: Thomas Alleman

Last July, in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Peter Dervan, the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, received the country’s highest award for scientific achievement, the National Medal of Science. The presidential citation noted “his fundamental research contributions at the interface of organic chemistry and biology” and his “influence in education and industrial innovation.”

In his Caltech office—overlooking a grassy quad, and dominated by a two-foot-high cast-metal sculpture of a DNA double helix (commissioned by his students and postdocs)—Dervan speaks with cheerful deliberateness of his early “good fortune” at working as an undergraduate researcher with BC professor Francis Bennett, in synthetic organic chemistry. The experience propelled him to pursue a Ph.D. at Yale instead of the Peace Corps. Research, he says, became “like going to the racetrack every day. I enjoyed the risk.” A short postdoctoral stint at Stanford followed, then an offer from Caltech, where he became an assistant professor at 28. His wife, Jacqueline Barton, is a Caltech chemist, too, and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and the Linus Pauling Medal.

Dervan’s early work at Yale, in physical organic chemistry, involved studying how chemical bonds are made and broken. He read all the classic papers and realized he was tilling a mature field. “I needed to find a problem of importance and complexity, something audacious,” he says. He hit on the topic of molecular recognition in biological systems. “Today it’s hot,” he observes, but “30 years ago, it seemed as if I was going off a cliff with my career.” The challenge he set was to develop molecules that would modulate gene expression.

Dervan goes to the blackboard and draws a cell with its nucleus and DNA. “Could the molecules we [he and his Caltech team] invented—DNA binding polyamides—be used to inhibit transcription factor/DNA interfaces in the promoters of selected genes and alter the biological software code for transcription?” The answer, in cell culture experiments, turned out to be yes. “The dream,” says Dervan, “is to reprogram aberrant gene expression in complex organisms” and ultimately in humans. “I come to work excited every day,” he says. “I am sobered by the thought that I may never get to finish, but that’s the life of a research scientist—chapter after chapter of a story that is never finished.”

Suzanne Mantell writes from Los Angeles.

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