The first thing that Stephen Wallace, now Professor of Chemical Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh did when he moved to his first house was buy a piano, a homage to a passion he had left behind when he first went to university. “It was really music or science at university for me”, he says, noting a distinct recollection of hating chemistry at school. “I really, really despised it”, he laughs. “I was a competitive piano player for years. That I took really seriously, and I loved it. I was playing Sonata competitions all around Scotland.”
Despite all this, Wallace became inspired to follow a scientific path, although, as he recalls, “it wasn’t for a reason I’m particularly proud of.” That reason was the popular TV series, CSI. “But”, he adds, “maybe that’s the power of science communication, right? To see that inextricable link between fundamental laboratory science and real-world impact for the first time—I found that really tantalizing.”
As a result, from the “really small village called Thornhill, in the southwest of Scotland”, where he grew up with his mother, a psychiatric nurse, and his father, who ran a haulage company, Wallace moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his undergraduate and Masters in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry, and then a PhD in Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, “focussed on natural product chemistry, working on trying to make the toxins that come from the skins of poisonous dart frogs, for pharmaceutical applications.” That PhD “wasn’t really something I planned on, either”, Wallace notes. “But during my undergraduate degree, I got to spend a year at GlaxoSmithKline as part of a team of chemists working on an anti-Alzheimer’s medication. They used to run patient insight seminars, where you got to go and spend time with people living with the disease. That was really intense. But again, it reinforced that almost otherwise intangible link between mixing chemicals in a flask, and actually treating somebody with life-threatening diseases. And that link between fundamental science and impact just got me hooked again.”
The impact of fundamental science on real world problems has since taken Wallace, who is one of the lead researchers of P3EB collaboration, to research the upcycling of plastic waste into various different chemicals. Wallace’s aim is to “make more sustainable industrial chemicals in a way that doesn’t involve drilling oil out of the ground, to find ways to circularize waste.” The big idea, he says, is to “create a future where we make chemicals in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet, but rather, utilizes it in the way that nature has been for millennia—to maybe create an industrial future where there’s no such thing as waste.”
That approach requires merging synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology, something that he has been fascinated with for a number of years. “Scientifically, chemical synthesis and biological synthesis have existed as two separate worlds for a really long time, and people have assumed that the tools developed by each of them just cannot be used together. Chemistry is seen as this quite harsh laboratory science. Microbial stuff? That’s in water, it’s in culture, it’s in fermenters.” But, the way Wallace sees it, “they’re both fields that have been essentially trying to do the same thing for the best part of the last 200 years.”
At the University of Edinburgh, Wallace’s team is now “applying tools from each in either field, to show where both can enhance what the other does—doing chemistry inside of cells that’s never been done in nature. And that’s been really fun. We’ve had some really great results come out of that sort of interaction. It’s like using chemistry to enhance what biology can do.”
Recently, that approach, of using engineering biology towards a sustainable alternative to processes that traditionally rely on finite fossil resources has led to the microbial upcycling of plastic waste for the production of paracetamol, as well as to levodopa, a drug used in the treatment of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
“I think my scientific comfort zone has been in early stage discovery”, says Wallace, “that initial Eureka moment that I really love in academic science. But we’ve done that basically in its entirety for the past eight years, since setting up the lab here. I think for us, the point has come to see whether we can translate that science into actual industrial processes.”