The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to a trio of chemists from the US and Denmark who laid the groundwork for a more functional form of chemistry. Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless, along with Denmark’s Morten Meldal, were awarded “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” the jury said. The award marks the second Nobel for the 81-year-old Sharpless, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Only four other individuals have achieved the feat, including France’s Marie Curie in Poland.
Click chemistry “is an elegant and efficient chemical reaction that is now widely used,” the jury said in a statement. “Among many other uses, it is used in drug development, for mapping DNA and creating materials that are better suited for a given purpose,” he added. This year’s chemistry prize is about not complicating things, but working with what is easy and simple,” Johan Aqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement.
The trio will share the 10 million Swedish kroner ($917,500) Nobel Prize, receiving it from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of scientist Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in 1896. his last will.
Click on chemistry
Sharpless, a professor at Scripps Research in California, “got the ball rolling” and “invented the concept of click chemistry” around 2000, the jury said. “Shortly thereafter, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless – independently – introduced what is now the crown jewel of click chemistry: the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition,” the jury said. Meldal, 68, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen.
She developed click reactions that work inside living organisms. Its bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell,” the jury said. “I’m totally stunned, I’m sitting here and I’m barely breathing,” Bertozzi told minutes after the announcement. Last year, the academy honored Germany’s Benjamin List and US-UK dual national David MacMillan for developing a precise molecular engineering tool known as asymmetric organocatalysis.
Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo received the prize for medicine on Monday for his discoveries of the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. Then on Tuesday, physicists Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Anton Zeilinger of Austria won the physics prize for developing experimental tools that helped demonstrate quantum entanglement, a phenomenon Albert Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” The chemistry prize will be followed by the much-watched literature and peace prizes, announced on Thursday and Friday. The peace prize is expected to have particular significance this year given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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