With a triumphant bum badadum the double doors open and the University of Pittsburgh Wang lab, its cramped walkways and general disarray, greeted PhD student Aaron Charlack for the day. After a brief visit to his desk (a similar model to the ones in the university dorms), he puts on his baby blue lab coat and makes his way over to his fume hood, a small workspace a couple feet across that looks like a garage if it had a clear door; the purpose of this is to trap fumes and flames that could contaminate other parts of the lab. The surface of his hood is covered in beakers and notated flash cards. Off to one side is a bucket of liquid materials, and to the other a hot plate warming a pecan-colored liquid. A lattice of stiff metal bars criss-crosses the back of the space, a few ring and test tube clamps hanging on for dear life, and in the front on the glass door are various notes like “un-ionized” pointing to a snake-shaped diagram and a checklist for cleaning before you leave. Jumping on my reaction to the disorder, Charlack says “I actually just cleaned this, it was really bad a week ago” with a certain bravado that might come from having this mess, but at the same time knowing where everything is.

But what does the Wang lab do? Within the field of organic chemistry, there are two main subcategories. Natural product synthesis, described as “when some guy goes ‘hey, we found this weird molecule in a rare sea sponge that we think might be used for cancer medication, but the sea sponge is rare and you need to kill it to extract [the molecule]. We can’t get it naturally so can you make it in a lab?’” and methodology, which attempts to make reactions that are stepping stones for the natural product synthesizers. The Wang lab works in methodology, Charlack specifically trying to remove negatively charged hydrogens called hydrides from organic molecules as the first step in a process to create one of these stepping stones. As he puts it, ”Our hope is that, if we can prove this reaction works, we can use it in the production of medications or preservatives or anything else made on an industrial scale. Of course, if it was used in medication It wouldn’t make it cheaper or anything, at least in the US, because capitalism sucks. You can edit that out if you want.”

This statement references industry, another important part of professional science, where even if you can create a new pathway involving less or simpler steps, it does matter if the materials for the new reactions are more expensive. The Wang lab works with iron, the second most abundant metal on Earth, but others use silver, gold or even palladium, which costs over two thousand dollars per ounce. “The issue with industry,” Charlack notes with a cautious air about him, “ is that you have to make things on a large scale. It’s not worth your time just to make a gram of something. That means you need different methods.” While there are research opportunities on the industrial scale, most of the work is repetition of the same processes over and over to create medicines and other things people need. Additionally, with automation already being used in more dangerous areas and becoming more widespread worldwide, the field is ever changing. “There’s automation everywhere. It’ll put people out of jobs, and we’ll see what that does to the economy…”

Once we were situated in the lab, safety glasses going over regular glasses and Charlack’s long, brunette hair tied into a makeshift ponytail, I recalled a moment from my last semester. The reason I was able to get in contact with Charlack was because he TAed for my General Chemistry 2 lab. In that lab, he mentioned teaching in a high school.

“You taught high school, right? For a year or two?”

“I like to say I taught high school, but if I’m being more accurate I simply did my student teaching. Throughout my undergrad, though, I did volunteer work with high school aged youth groups, and in the summer I worked in an elementary school.”

“So would you say you’ve always wanted to do lab research, and taught on the side, or-”

“It’s more like the other way around. I always knew I wanted to be a teacher, that’s why I did all the volunteer work and my masters, but it was annoying, teaching people hybrid and over zoom. And because it was over zoom, parents would be watching and complain ‘oh, you’re not teaching my kid right’ and I didn’t have the patience for that bullshit. I liked chemistry, so I figured I’d learn some more chemistry.”

Even before teaching over Zoom, though, Charlack was no stranger to dealing with the woes of education. During his undergraduate studies, a science professor with a PhD in education filed a formal complaint against his crude language after hearing him say “halogens fuck shit up” (he assured me that they definitely do, sporting a snarky smile). After appearing in front of a board of department of education bigwigs to defend himself, Charlack was left with a sour spot for teachers. “There’s something about people with PhDs in education that make them not worth talking to.”

This situation gave Charlack spite towards education as a whole, and was one of the reasons he ultimately decided to get his PhD, along with the difficulties of online learning and multiple recommendations from undergraduate professors who recognized his passion. Getting a PhD, though, means you get to teach, and so far he has had around 150 students in his lab courses. He describes his students as “a mixed bag,” ranging from those he still keeps in contact with today, to those who wouldn’t turn in lab reports and then argue against their failing grade, to those who took advantage of his “music recommendations in lab” policy to play “Brass Monkey” by the Beastie Boys every single lab for a full semester. While the end goal is to teach, not working with children has some undeniable benefits.

On this fateful Monday, Charlack is working with tetramethylpiperidine (TMPH), a larger molecule with a lot of moving parts, making it more difficult to experiment on than previous ones he’s worked with. Up until this point, he’d been using similar methods to what he’s used for other molecules, but those haven’t been working for TMPH. One of these problems is that “water fucks up everything.” Water and oxygen in the air tend to react with things spontaneously, especially when you don’t want them to. The solution to this is to conduct these hydrophobic experiments in a glove box.

As Charlack walks over to the glove box, a coworker listening in calls out “you mean the space box?” jokingly, but he couldn’t have given it a more apt moniker. The space box refers to a gargantuan, off white tank with four black rubber gloves jutting out like barriers in a childrens’ obstacle course. This backwards mechanism is there so the scientists can reach into the box without air getting in, though according to Charlack “the really annoying part is sometimes you forget there’s glass there and go to scratch your nose.” Inside the box are shelves and shelves of materials which are stored inside permanently, seeing that to take things in and out you need to use a vacuum to get all the air out, taking about a minute each time. Because of this restriction, if anything spills or breaks in the space box you need to vacuum a vacuum, a small dustbuster, taking it in through the hole (after getting yelled at, Charlack adds). The box is the biggest piece of equipment in the lab by far and is specific to work which requires this absence of water, a task shared by only one other lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

Up until this point, Charlack had been conversing regularly and light-heartedly as he worked, even quizzing me on topics I should have remembered from my chemistry classes but didn’t. “I’m always a teacher,” he said stoically. But now, with the experiment prepared and all necessary materials moved into the space box, the atmosphere became more serious. He places his hands into the rubber gloves, carefully maneuvering each finger in one at a time, and grabs his materials, test tubes half-filled with liquids of various colors, out of the vacuum chamber. Shifting over to the leftmost gloves, he begins to mix the test tubes, at times moving his head closer to and farther away from the looming glass wall to better manage its glare. Every so often, he turns his head to double-check a green notebook sitting on a gray, three-legged stool off to the side that is filled with various calculations, some of which matching the black marker on his hood. 24.2 milligrams of iron, exactly twenty percent of the amount of other materials, gets dropped into the amalgamation of reactants which has become a cloudy, white material. A Lewis acid to stabilize the reaction, and all you can do is wait. The test tube, now almost three quarters full, gets placed back into the vacuum with a rubber cap to prevent air from getting in, and Charlack’s hands slowly retreat out of the gloves. After a few taps on a small monitor to the right of the box and a quick beep, the tube returns from space. The final solution is blood red and viscous enough to leave a bit of residue as Charlack swirls it around in its container. To be sure though, he leaves it in a mixer called a bath where it will sit for the next 24 hours.

A few days later, Aaron dismissively reports that the formation of an alkyne using the iron catalyst, the stepping stone he was trying to make, has failed, likely due to the iron being hindered by another reactant. He describes this as a “consistent issue” that has been plaguing multiple recent experiments, and one that he and his lab mates have been trying to solve for a while. Even though I didn’t witness history in the making, he noted that the first phase of the experiment, a mixing of the reactants that resulted in the white cloudiness, succeeded, a step in the right direction. Similar to career choice, science isn’t always going to be exactly what you want on the first try, but what matters is to keep going, to find your dream job or dream molecule.