Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, Barry Sharpless awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Stockholm: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless.

Bertozzi from Stanford University, US; Meldal from University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Sharpless from Scripps Research, US have been awarded “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry” “BREAKING NEWS: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2022 #NobelPrize in Chemistry to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” the official Twitter feed of the Nobel Prize said in a tweet.

“Barry Sharpless has just become the fifth individual to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. He follows in the footsteps of double #NobelPrize laureates John Bardeen, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger. Sharpless was awarded the chemistry prize in 2001 and 2022,”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 is about making difficult processes easier. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal have laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry – click chemistry – in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. Carolyn Bertozzi has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilising it in living organisms.

Chemists have long been driven by the desire to build increasingly complicated molecules. In pharmaceutical research, this has often involved artificially recreating natural molecules with medicinal properties. This has led to many admirable molecular constructions, but these are generally time consuming and very expensive to produce.

“This year’s Prize in Chemistry deals with not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple. Functional molecules can be built even by taking a straightforward route,” says Johan Aqvist, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.