Jay Switzer: Not Your Average Mad Scientist

Name: Jay Switzer

UMR connection: Donald L. Castleman/Foundation for Chemical Research Professor of Discovery

World's longest job title? Close.

First Eureka! moment: In the basement of his childhood home in Ohio, a 12-year-old Switzer used a chemistry set his parents bought him to manufacture his own fireworks, which were illegal in Ohio.

Oops: "One day I made tear gas down in the basement," Switzer says. "I made too much and it got loose and went upstairs through the vents." He raced upstairs to warn his parents, who evacuated the house before his concoction assaulted their tear ducts.

Itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny: Switzer is an international authority in the field of nano-materials - substances so small they must be measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter, and can be seen only with a scanning tunneling microscope.

By the book: Switzer has published four papers in the journal Science . His research was featured in the British journal Nature and was on Chemical and Engineering News magazine's list of breakthrough discoveries in 2003.

Latest Eureka! moment: Switzer discovered a new, less-expensive process that could be used to sort chiral chemicals from their less useful and sometimes toxic counterparts. The process could prove to be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry.

Look ma, two hands: Switzer studies chirality. "Throughout the biological world, in all living things, there are molecules which have a right- and a left-hand form. The two forms are like a person's right and left hands - almost identical, only reversed. They are mirror images, but they aren't superimposable. That is what we mean by chiral.

Example please: In the 1950s in Europe, thalidomide, originally used as a sedative, was prescribed to pregnant women to aid morning sickness. However, while one "hand" of the molecule relieved the woman's nausea, the other hand was toxic, and caused birth defects.

What else? Ibuprofen -- commonly found in over-the-counter pain relievers. In its case, the molecule's left hand is 100 times more powerful than the right.

Listen to your inner scientist: "This could be really, really big," Switzer says. "This is the most important work we've ever done, but if somebody had told me to do this, I wouldn't have thought it was worth doing."