Three scientists who sparked a revolution in chemistry by devising a way to ‘click’ molecules 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 at Scripps Research in California were honored for finding and exploiting elegant and efficient chemical reactions to create complex molecules for the pharmaceutical industry , mapping DNA and manufacturing design materials.
The prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday, is worth 10 million Swedish kroner (£804,000) and will be split equally between the winners.
The Nobel committee said the prize was awarded “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”
Professor Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel Committee in Chemistry, described the prize as “a fantastic prize for a fantastic discovery”.
“They’ve been working on methods to try to connect molecules, to connect building blocks so that they stick together very easily and simply, basically the same way you build Lego,” he said.
“You can have 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, albeit at a very, very, molecular level.”
Although Nobel Prizes are rare enough, the award puts Sharpless in the even more exclusive club of double winners. It is his second Nobel Prize in chemistry, the first was in 2001 for his work on “chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions”. Four other scientists have won two Nobel Prizes, namely John Bardeen, Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and Fred Sanger.
Dr Phillip Broadwith, of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Chemistry World, said the award had been in the making 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-throughput and clean, meaning they don’t produce many unwanted byproducts, Broadwith said. One of the first “click reactions,” the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, was discovered independently by Sharpless and Meldal and had given rise to its own branch of synthetic chemistry, he added.
Professor Johan Åqvist, chairman of the Nobel committee, compared 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 joined each other, and only each other.
Bertozzi used click chemistry to develop “bioorthogonal” reactions that operate safely inside living organisms without disrupting their biochemistry. The breakthrough allowed scientists to track the movement of biomolecules in cells and thus dissect the complex workings of life.
In a press call, Bertozzi said he was “absolutely shocked” to hear the news from Stockholm. “I’m sitting here, I can hardly breathe,” she said.
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The reactions developed by the winners have led scientists to create new types of biomolecules and create materials that can deliver cancer drugs precisely where they are needed in human patients.
Professor Gill Reid, President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said of the winners. “Their work has incredible potential for applications in human health and medicine and the possibilities are incredibly exciting.”
Bertozzi is only the eighth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2020, Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Research Unit for Pathogen Science in Berlin, and Professor Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, became the first two women to share the chemistry prize for work on the “molecular scissors” used to edit the genetic code.
On Monday, Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work on ancient DNA, particularly the sequencing of the genetic code of Neanderthals, an extinct relative of modern humans.
The physics prize was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists who carried out ground-breaking experiments on quantum entanglement, the phenomenon described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”. His work laid the foundation for the growing research into quantum computers, quantum networks, and quantum encrypted communications.