Morphine is one of medicine's essential painkillers. Attach two acetyl groups, among the most ordinary building blocks in organic chemistry, and it becomes diacetylmorphine: heroin. The small change lets the molecule cross the blood–brain barrier far faster, turning a hospital analgesic into one of the world's most notorious drugs. How can one simple step in a flask change what a molecule does to the entire nervous system?
Questions like that drive the organic chemistry track Caltech professor Brian Stoltz teaches in CRI's Seoul Research Program. The 2026 track ran in person in Seoul for ten days in July. It is aimed at students heading toward chemistry, materials science, pre-med or pre-pharmacy, especially those who have memorized functional groups and enantiomers for AP Chemistry and wondered what any of it is for.
Why go past the AP textbook
School chemistry often means titrations with a known outcome and lab reports on the same topics everyone else picks. Selective US colleges and medical and pharmacy programs want more than correct answers. They look for what admissions officers call intellectual vitality: the habit of asking your own questions.
Organic chemistry is a good place to build that habit, because it asks what high school chemistry rarely does: how molecules react, and how to make new ones. Most medicines, from cancer drugs and antibiotics to everyday painkillers, are designed and made this way. So are plastics, polymers and functional fibers, and organic reactions explain even the aroma of coffee and chocolate.
Meet Brian Stoltz
Stoltz earned his PhD in organic chemistry at Yale University, then did postdoctoral research at Harvard University in the group of E. J. Corey, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, working on the synthesis of complex natural products. He opened his own laboratory at Caltech in 2000 and is a professor of chemistry there.
His group is known for cracking long-standing problems and for developing new methods:
- 2-Quinuclidonium tetrafluoroborate, a molecule chemists had tried and failed to make for decades.
- Jorunnamycin A and cyanthiwigin F, rare natural products otherwise obtained from marine organisms and directly relevant to anticancer and antibiotic drug discovery. The lab has also synthesized .
