When Dan Shea was an undergraduate at Northeastern’s College of Science, he spent much of his time hanging out with a plant. Or parts of a plant, anyway: Cell cultures from the California poppy. The plant produces a group of molecules called BPAs, not to be confused with the polymers plaguing water bottles and microwave ...
When I was in high school I read a book called Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice that I thought was going to define the rest of my life (I’ve always been kind of dramatic like that). It was about discovering the chemical compounds found in plants that cultures have been using for centuries, even millennia, ...