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Office Artifacts: Karen Allen

This CAS scientist loves pop culture, especially Marvel comics

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A visitor might think that the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3-D Printer in Karen Allen’s office at the Metcalf Science Center is official BU apparatus, part of her lab equipment. Not so.

“Knowing what a nerd I am,” says Allen, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of chemistry, “my husband bought it for my birthday.”

Now the 3-D printer produces items for both work and pleasure. The tiny dinosaur skull with the unicorn’s horn? Purely for fun. The red blobby thing? That, obviously, is a molecular model of acetoacetate decarboxylase, an enzyme used to make acetone. The model is a reminder that Allen and her team spent more than a decade uncovering the enzyme’s structure and published their results in 2008.

The Allen Lab focuses on understanding how enzymes work to catalyze reactions, studying them with such methods as X-ray crystallography. The goal is to achieve better paths to drug discovery. “Enzymes do amazing, amazing things,” says Allen, who is also a College of Engineering professor of materials science and engineering. But she was a nerd long before she was a scientist, devouring Marvel comics like X-Men, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man as a child in Huntington, Conn.