Three scientists who fuelled a revolution in chemistry by devising a way to “click” molecules together like Lego bricks, even inside living organisms, have been awarded the 2022 Nobel prize in chemistry.
Carolyn Bertozzi, at Stanford University, Morten Meldal, at the University of Copenhagen, and K Barry Sharpless, from Scripps Research in California, were honoured for finding and exploiting elegant and efficient chemical reactions to create complex molecules for the pharmaceutical industry, mapping DNA and making designer materials.
The award, announced on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, is worth 10m Swedish krona (£804,000), and will be shared equally among the winners.
The Nobel committee said the prize was given “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”.
Prof Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel chemistry committee, described the award as “a fantastic prize for a fantastic discovery”.
“They have been working on methods to try to connect molecules, to connect building blocks so they click together very simply and straightforwardly, in essentially the same way as you build Lego,” he said.
“You can have the Lego pieces and you can click them together and build very advanced houses, or tools, or vehicles, even spaceships. It’s the same with this chemistry, although at the very, very, molecular level.”
While Nobel honours are rare enough, the prize puts Sharpless in the even more exclusive club of double winners. It is his second Nobel prize in chemistry, his first being in 2001 for work on “chirally catalysed oxidation reactions”. Four other scientists have won two Nobels, namely John Bardeen, Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and Fred Sanger.
Dr Phillip Broadwith, from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s magazine Chemistry World, said the prize had been predicted for years. “It’s about having ultimate control over chemical reactions,” he said.
Sharpless coined the term “click chemistry” to describe reactions that are fast, high-yielding and clean, meaning that they do not produce a lot of unwanted side-products, Broadwith said. One of the first “click reactions”, the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, was discovered independently by Sharpless and Meldal and had sprouted its own branch of synthetic chemistry, he added.
Prof Johan Åqvist, the chair of the Nobel committee, likened click chemistry to attaching small chemical buckles to molecular building blocks so they can be linked together. The trick, he said, was to find buckles that bound to each other, and only each other. (Guardian)