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On a drizzly Monday afternoon, clinical pathologist Chin-Lee Wu sits down at an unoccupied desk a few feet away from one of the ӳý’s bustling laboratories and gets ready to examine over 100 slides beneath a microscope. Chin-Lee is a surgical pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital where he specializes in urological cancers, including prostate, kidney, and bladder cancers. For the last three years, he has also served as a consultant pathologist for the ӳý, peering at prepared slides of cancer samples and making sense of the cellular disarray. (See more in the video below.)

A ring is nothing more than a line whose ends have been joined together. But this deceptively simple structure sits at the heart of chemical compounds that have shaped human history. Drugs like the antimalarial quinine, the antibiotic erythromycin, the immunosuppressant rapamycin, and many other fascinating and critical organic compounds contain chains of carbon, linked together in a ring.

Ramnik Xavier calls it “learning from human genetics.” That’s how the senior associate member of the ӳý describes his research building on the soaring number of genes now known to be implicated in two common disorders, Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes.