By Dave Cucchiara

Communications & Program Associate

Dr. John Moses, Professor of Click Chemistry at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), took an unconventional and winding path before finding his current area of study. After working various jobs early in life, he decided to pursue a chemistry degree at the University of Bath. A year at Purdue University in the late 1990s deepened his commitment to the field, and eventually, in 2004, he earned a Ph.D. position at Oxford under legendary organic chemist, Sir Jack Baldwin. It was there, in the middle of his doctoral research, that Dr. Moses came across a paper that would change the direction of his career.

“I found this paper in about 2000,” he said. “It was about a new approach called click chemistry. I thought, ‘What the heck is this?’ But as I read it, I thought, ‘Wow — this is a completely different way of thinking about how we make molecules.’” The inventor was Dr. K. Barry Sharpless, a two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose ideas about rapid, efficient molecule-building were beginning to reshape the field.

That’s where it all “clicked.” Instantly, Dr. Moses knew he had to work with him, so he reached out to Sir Jack, a friend and ex-colleague of Barry, to coordinate a postdoctoral position, a position Dr. Moses would eventually land. His decision to work with Barry would launch a decades-long collaboration and friendship, and it cemented Moses’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of chemistry to meet real-world biological and pharmaceutical needs.

Today, Dr. Moses leads the Click Chemistry Laboratory at CSHL, establishing and operating the institution’s first and only chemistry research group. At a campus recognized for biology, Dr. Moses brings chemistry into the fold — not as a separate program, but as an enabling technology and catalyst for future discovery. Click chemistry enables scientists to “click” together different naturally occurring components of molecules to create new, more potent therapies. “If you’re going to make a lot of molecules to find function, you need the best, most efficient reactions,” Moses said. “Click chemistry speeds up the whole process of discovery.”

The Moses Lab is now applying that philosophy to some of the most challenging problems in medicine. Using a natural molecule called jerantinine A, the lab developed a novel derivative that shows powerful activity against triple-negative breast cancer, one of the most aggressive and difficult-to-treat forms of the disease. In a separate line of research, the lab identified a vulnerability in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and used click chemistry to refine a natural product into a compound that targets this weakness, which showed strong results in animal models.

Since arriving at CSHL in 2020, Moses has not only built a world-class chemistry program, but also launched an initiative to ensure its impact grows well beyond his lab. His Chemistry for Biology (C4B) program trains young scientists to think beyond disciplinary boundaries, integrating the precision of chemistry with the complexity of biological questions. “One of the problems in working in science,” he said, “is siloed thinking. Once you specialize, it’s all too easy to lose sight of advances in other fields — yet such discoveries can be instructive.

C4B is designed to promote cross-disciplinary thinking. Through new coursework, seminars, and public programming, Moses is helping to cultivate a generation of scientists fluent in both languages. “We’re still in the infancy of science,” he said. “There’s so much to discover. If you want to make meaningful breakthroughs, you have to create space for ideas to flow between fields.”

For Moses, it’s a personal mission as much as a professional one. “There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and being excited to go to work,” he said. “That excitement, that curiosity, is what helps drive science forward.”

At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, that drive is now fused to a powerful idea: when chemistry and biology move together, cures are closer than we think.