Sugar & Spice

Roger Sandwick's research focuses on potentially toxic compounds—and tasty treats.

By Suki Casanave

Photograph by Dennis Curran

In Roger Sandwick's office, not far from a well-stocked bowl of Starburst candies, a bunch of puzzles lie scattered on a low table. Complex cubes in a half-finished state are waiting for the final pieces to be added. Metal shapes linked together in a maddening mess are waiting to be untangled. The puzzles come in handy here in an office that is often full of students waiting to talk with Sandwick about a chemistry question. While they wait, they fiddle. "People are always picking up the puzzles and experimenting," says the associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. Every once in awhile, someone figures something out. A piece drops into place. A shape is released from the tangle. And then, usually, there's a small shout of triumph.

Those moments always make Sandwick smile. He recognizes that thrill of discovery. It's what he lives for, both in his teaching and in his research. "Working in the lab is like solving a series of puzzles," he says. "I love getting in there and finding something I didn't know before." But solving unknowns, he adds, only happens if you're paying attention. That's part of what he loves: You have to keep looking. If you keep your eyes open, you just might find something.

The French scientist Louis Camille Maillard discovered what came to be known as the Maillard reaction when he was attempting to solve a puzzle of his own back in 1912. As he was trying to figure out how amino acids link up to form proteins, he found that when sugars and amino acids are heated together, the mixture turns brown. Also called "the browning reaction," the Maillard reaction is responsible for the lovely, just-right coloring on turkey and other cooked meats, as well as on french fries, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies. Maple syrup and coffee also get their brown tones from the Maillard reaction. "Somewhere in the process of making each of these things," says Sandwick, "sugar and amino acids combine to create the color, along with flavor and aroma."

Which is why the Maillard reaction is of special interest to people in the food industry. At a recent international Maillard reaction conference, Sandwick, who studies the effect of this reaction on the human body, found himself surrounded by various food experts. "Someone from the Danish meat institute, someone else from a Swiss company that designs seasonings—they're all looking to create special flavors and aromas to perfectly match the food they want to present," he says. "The Maillard reaction represents big dollars for the food industry."

In 2000, researchers in Europe sparked new interest in the reaction when it was discovered that some of its byproducts, including acryl-amide, could be toxic. For most people, says Sandwick, this finding is no cause for worry. "Mankind has been

eating Maillard compounds since humans started cooking over fire," he says. "Our liver does a good job of taking care of them."

Still, he says, potentially toxic by-products of the Maillard reaction deserve scrutiny because cooked food isn't the only place the reaction occurs. It occurs constantly in the human body, as glucose, the body's main sugar, reacts with amino acids. In most people, the reaction has no effect. But Maillard compounds can pose all sorts of problems for some people, including diabetics, who have high blood sugar. Some even suggest that the host of health issues diabetics face can all be traced to the Maillard reaction. It may have implications for other ailments, too, including cataracts, Alzheimer's, and renal failure.

The sugar Sandwick uses in his research—ribose-5-phosphate—is nowhere near as abundant in the human body as glucose. But it reacts so much faster to amino acids that Maillard compounds are produced at a much higher, and potentially damaging, rate. How much faster? If you take glucose and mix it with amino acid, explains Sandwick, it would take weeks for it to make any type of brown compound. Mix amino acids with ribose-5-phosphate and the reaction occurs in just three or four hours. "I'm interested in knowing if this intense reaction is producing any potentially toxic compounds," he says, "and how dangerous they might be."

The process is so complicated, explains Sandwick, that most of the reaction remains a mystery. "It's not a one-step reaction. You don't go from A to B," says Elizabeth Breuer '05, who found the Maillard reaction so interesting she chose it as the subject of her senior thesis. "There are countless variations, infinite numbers of concentrations and temperatures. That's why it's such a complicated reaction." Breuer filled more than 2,000 test tubes during the year, mixing sugar with different types of amino acids, testing them every two hours, and recording her findings. "You could literally see it turning brown, which is so cool," says Breuer.

Breuer, who is headed for a career in medicine, is passionate about the Maillard reaction. "The research showed me that there are so many things in the body that can react with each other; we'll just never understand it all," she says. "That's the beauty—and the frustration—of it. The two go hand in hand." The work was not easy, Breuer admits. "But the great thing about Roger is that he really lets the scientific process play itself out. He gives you the freedom to design your own experiments—and lets you screw up multiple times, fine-tuning them for your own good. He gave me the courage to go out there and think about why things were happening."

Some kids dream about playing baseball. Sandwick used to dream about science. What would it be like, he tried to imagine, to win a Nobel Prize? Years later, as he pursues his Maillard reaction research, he knows his work is not likely to win a Nobel Prize. Like countless other dedicated scientists, he has learned that a life devoted to research has very little to do with the hope of winning recognition—and everything to do with the satisfaction of simply working at the puzzle.

It's what keeps him returning to the lab again and again— and to the classroom. There's nothing he likes better than prodding students to find answers to their questions, listening to the latest update on their own lab work, and sharing discoveries or disappointments from his own research. Over and over again, in countless ways, he tells them the same thing: Good research takes patience. Moments of discovery can be few and far between. But they will come—if you keep your eyes open and pay attention. Keep working. Delight in the pursuit. For there's something satisfying in just that—knowing that there's always another puzzle at hand, waiting to be solved.