Twelve years ago, when Stuart Schreiber was 28, he earned the questionable distinction of being the first chemist to synthesize a naturally occurring compound called periplanon-b, the sex attractant of the American cockroach. Schreiber says he was drawn to periplanon-b because of its geometric beauty. Having synthesized the molecule in his Yale laboratory, though, he decided he might as well pursue the obvious experiment, so he descended into the chemistry building basement.
I went down with one of my graduate students, a flashlight, a shoe box--it was all pretty primitive--and I had a book showing pictures of different kinds of cockroaches, he explains. But I had trouble distinguishing the male from the female. I was reading that the markings on the leg would distinguish them, but I could never do that. So I found some American cockroaches--the big ones--and I didn’t know if they were male or female, but only the male responds to this periplanon-b. It was very exciting: you could take extraordinarily tiny quantities of the stuff, picograms, and puff them into the air, and these cockroaches would flap their wings and stand up. Only half of them would do it, and that’s how you knew which were the males.
The news reports of Schreiber’s synthesis were less than adulatory--Esquire magazine gave him a Dubious Achievement Award for creating a cockroach dating service. Still, Schreiber’s experience with cockroach sexuality was the spiritual beginning of what may become a revolution in modern medicine and biology. It led Schreiber unwittingly from his mundane life as an organic chemist into the world of cell biology and the study of how signals are passed to living cells from the outside world. Little was known about that process, called signal transduction, when Schreiber sent his roaches into a tizzy. Researchers saw that chemicals floating in the body outside the cells somehow caused activity among the cells’ genes; in the early 1980s, though, they had only just begun to ask why.
They knew that though DNA acts like an encyclopedic how-to manual for a cell, it is kept squirreled away in the nucleus, surrounded by material called cytoplasm, and sealed up tightly in the cell membrane. Tens of thousands of receptors stud the membrane, waiting for messages from the world outside the cell. The messages and receptors take the form of proteins, and their union is the first step in a pathway that acts like an electric circuit, carrying signals to the nucleus.
