Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work ‘Snapping Molecules Together’

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Okay. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the event of click on chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry.

Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth lady to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee famous.

Johan Aqvist, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, mentioned that this 12 months’s prize handled “not overcomplicating issues, as a substitute working with what is straightforward and easy.”

“Click on chemistry is sort of prefer it sounds,” he mentioned. “It’s all about snapping molecules collectively. Think about that you could possibly connect small chemical buckles to various kinds of constructing blocks. Then you could possibly hyperlink these buckles collectively and produce molecules of higher complexity and variation.”

“The issue was to search out good chemical buckles,” Dr. Aqvist added. “They should react with one another, simply and particularly. Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless independently discovered the primary excellent candidates that may simply snap collectively, and importantly they received’t snap with the rest.”

Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, emphasised the significance of click on remedy in medication and “drug supply,” which includes “doing chemistry inside residing sufferers to ensure medication go to the precise place and to not the improper place.”

“The sphere of click on chemistry remains to be in its early phases,” she mentioned, including that there have been “many new reactions to be found and invented,” in addition to new purposes to be present in industries like biotech, and in treating and diagnosing sicknesses.

“These are areas that will probably be very strongly impacted by click on chemistry, they usually have already got been,” mentioned Dr. Bertozzi, who earned her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry on the College of California, Berkeley, in 1993.

Dr. Aqvist famous that click on chemistry “can now be used for constructing drug molecules, polymers, new supplies and lots of different issues.”

Earlier than the award was introduced on Wednesday, the committee hinted that the prize might once more be given to a lady, with a pair of Twitter posts highlighting Marie Curie and the 2020 winners, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

“I’m completely shocked. I’m sitting right here and might hardly breathe,” Dr. Bertozzi mentioned on a name with the committee. “I’m nonetheless not fully optimistic that it’s actual, nevertheless it’s getting realer by the minute.”

Whereas she mentioned that she had not but had time to think about the right way to use the award cash, Dr. Bertozzi famous that “to the extent that the prize casts a light-weight on chemical biology, that’s an exquisite factor.”

The committee additionally telegraphed how uncommon it’s for scientists to win two Nobels, noting that Curie was one of many few to have performed so. Dr. Sharpless, the committee famous afterward, turns into the fifth member of that club.

It’s the third Nobel Prize given within the sciences this week. The awards are among the many highest honors in science, recognizing groundbreaking contributions of their discipline.

Who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2021?

The prize was awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan for his or her improvement of a software that spurred analysis into new medication and lowered chemistry’s impact on the setting.

Who else has received a Nobel Prize within the sciences this 12 months?

When will the opposite Nobel Prizes be introduced?

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will probably be awarded on Thursday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Final 12 months, Abdulrazak Gurnah received for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the results of colonialism and the destiny of the refugee within the gulf between cultures and continents.”

• The Nobel Peace Prize will probably be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Final 12 months, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, each journalists, received for his or her efforts to guard press freedoms.

• Subsequent week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Financial Sciences will probably be awarded on Monday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Final 12 months, the prize went to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.

The entire prize bulletins may even be streamed live by the Nobel Prize establishment. Prize winners will obtain their awards at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.