Led by Sir Fraser Stoddart, a chemistry professor at Northwestern, the team discovered this method by accident when looking for something else. A postdoc named Zhichang Liu was trying to make three-dimensional cubes out of gold and starch, aiming to use them as storage containers for gases and small molecules. But a liquid mixture of dissolved gold-bromide salts and a starch-derived sugar didn't form cubes, it formed needles. This was strange, so the team decided to try to replicate it and tested different forms of sugars.