Tania Magoon '01, a Union Scholar
who had a double major in chemistry and classics, reads the Iliad — in Greek — to relax.
But she put down Homer's epic long
enough last summer to develop an improved testing procedure that could be a boon to lab technicians and prosecutors alike.
Magoon, a native of Pittsfield,
Mass., began her research under the guidance of Professor of Chemistry Tom
Werner. Their goal was to develop a method to separate the narcotic and inactive
forms of the compound propoxyphene, the ingredient in narcotic painkillers.
In only three weeks, she hit pay
dirt.
“I went in to Professor Werner's
office and said, 'I guess I can go home now. I'm done,' ” she recalls.
Actually, Magoon admits, there was much to be done to refine the method, which
was based on earlier research by Michelle Nerozzi '00 and Jen Jakubowski '00.
The project, funded by a grant from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, was part of
Werner's collaboration with scientists at the New York State Forensics Center
in Albany.
The active ingredient in
widely-prescribed painkillers such as Darvon, propoxyphene is among the top ten
most abused substances, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The
drug's popularity has spawned an illicit trade that authorities are trying to
curb. But success in prosecuting cases has been limited by a tedious and
subjective laboratory procedure that may not hold up in court.
Magoon may have made it easier for
laboratory technicians to detect propoxyphene, a so-called “chiral drug” that
consists of mirror-image molecules, only one of which is the active agent. The
problem – for scientists and for prosecutors seeking convictions for drug
charges – has been that the test involves a tedious and highly subjective observation
of crystal patterns in the sample. There was no “hard copy” of the test
results, only an interpretation.
Magoon found that a cyclodextrin
compound introduced in capillary zone electrophoresis would yield two “spikes,”
one for the L (inactive) form of propoxyphene, another for the D (controlled)
form.
“This has really helped us because
we haven't had the analytical time to do this on our own,” said Warren Hull, a
forensic scientist for the state lab. “For us, this is a new technique, and we
hope we can adapt this directly to other techniques.”
The research by Magoon and Werner
was supported by a Pfizer Pharmaceuticals program known as SURF (Summer
Undergraduate Research Fellowships). At Prize Day this spring, Magoon received
the Robert G. O'Neale Prize (for the highest standing in classics), the
President's Commission on the Status of Women Senior Scholarly Activity Award,
and the Robert M. Fuller Prize (to a chemistry senior for unusual ability in
original experimental work). She received a National Science Foundation
Fellowship (the first to a Union student since 1992) and will enter Harvard
this fall to begin work on a Ph.D. in organic chemistry.