The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was yesterday awarded to a trio of chemists from the US and Denmark who laid the foundation for a more functional form of chemistry.
Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless, together with Denmark’s Morten Meldal, were honored “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” the jury said.
The award marks the second Nobel for 81-year-old Sharpless, who won the chemistry Nobel in 2001. Only four other people have achieved the feat, including Polish-born Frenchwoman Marie Curie.
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Click chemistry “is an elegant and efficient chemical reaction that is now in widespread use,” the jury said in a statement.
“Among many other uses, it is utilized in the development of pharmaceuticals, for mapping DNA and creating materials that are more fit for purpose,” it added.
“This year’s Prize in Chemistry deals with not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple,” Johan Aqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in the statement.
The trio are to share the Nobel award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (US$911,504) and would receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
Sharpless, a professor at Scripps Research in California, “started the ball rolling” and “coined the concept of click chemistry” in about 2000, the jury said.
“Shortly afterward, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless — independently of each other — presented 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.
Bertozzi, who is a professor at Stanford University in the US, then took it to “a new level.”
“She developed click reactions that work inside living organisms. Her bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell,” the jury said.
“I’m absolutely stunned, I’m sitting here and I can hardly breathe,” Bertozzi told reporters via telephone, minutes after the announcement.
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