Soon after Jake Eaton joined the lab of Stuart Schreiber at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2015, the postdoctoral researcher became intrigued by some wild theories being debated by his colleagues. The theories centered on a strange small molecule known as ML210, which can kill cells by turning on a cellular process called ferroptosis. Vasanthi Viswanathan, a postdoctoral fellow in the Schreiber lab, had discovered that inducing ferroptosis could kill some drug-resistant cancer cells. Eaton, Viswanathan, and Schreiber believed that understanding how ML210 triggers that process could unlock secrets for how to develop drugs for treating cancers resistant to existing therapies, or prevent resistance in the first place.