590816 external_news 1493056088 1493063844 Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, has watched biologists pull in billions of dollars to decipher the human genome, and physicists persuade governments to fund the gargantuan Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the Higgs boson. Meanwhile chemists, divided among dozens of research areas, often wind up fighting for existing funds. Burke wants to change that. He has proposed that chemists rally around an initiative to synthesize most of the hundreds of thousands of known organic natural products: the diverse small molecules made by microbes, plants, and animals. He has teamed with Jeffrey Skolnick, a computational biologist and professor in the School of Biological Sciences, to come up with a potentially easier way to synthesize natural products. 

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