The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry.
Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee noted.
The three chemists have been working independently since 2000 to create functional molecules that have “led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together,” the Nobel committee said.
Johan Aqvist, the chair of the chemistry committee, said that this year’s prize dealt with “not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple.”
“Click chemistry is almost like it sounds,” he said of a field whose name Dr. Sharpless coined in 2000. “It’s all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation.”
Shortly after Dr. Sharpless coined the concept, both he and Dr. Meldal independently discovered a chemical reaction called “the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition,” known today as the crown jewel of click chemistry.
“When this reaction was discovered, it was like opening the floodgates,” Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a briefing after the laureates were announced. “We were using it everywhere, to build everything.”
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Dr. Bertozzi was able to apply this reaction to biomolecules in living organisms without affecting the chemistry of the cells she was observing. These so-called bio-orthogonal reactions have been applied widely to pharmaceutical developments in cancer, DNA sequencing and material sciences.
She “revolutionized the way we can analyze or see molecules in the living body,” Dr. Ramström said.
The Nobel committee said in a statement that “click chemistry and bio-orthogonal reactions have taken chemistry into the era of functionalism,” adding that “this is bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.”
The key was to find “good chemical buckles,” Dr. Aqvist said. “They have to react with each other, easily and specifically. Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless independently found the first perfect candidates that will easily snap together, and importantly they won’t snap with anything else.”
Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, emphasized the importance of click therapy in medicine and “drug delivery,” which involves “doing chemistry inside living patients to make sure drugs go to the right place and not to the wrong place.”
“The field of click chemistry is still in its early phases,” she said, adding that there were “many new reactions to be discovered and invented,” as well as new applications to be found in industries like biotech, and in treating and diagnosing illnesses.
“These are areas that will be very strongly impacted by click chemistry, and they already have been,” said Dr. Bertozzi, who earned her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.
Dr. Aqvist noted that click chemistry “can now be used for building drug molecules, polymers, new materials and many other things.”
Before the award was announced on Wednesday, the committee hinted that the prize could again be given to a woman, with a pair of Twitter posts highlighting Marie Curie and the 2020 winners, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.
“I’m absolutely stunned. I’m sitting here and can hardly breathe,” Dr. Bertozzi said on a call with the committee. “I’m still not entirely positive that it’s real, but it’s getting realer by the minute.”
While she said that she had not yet had time to consider how to use the award money, Dr. Bertozzi noted that “to the extent that the prize casts a light on chemical biology, that’s a wonderful thing.”
The committee also telegraphed how rare it is for scientists to win two Nobels, noting that Curie was one of the few to have done so. Dr. Sharpless, the committee noted afterward, becomes the fifth member of that club, having received the chemistry prize in 2001 for his work on “chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions.”
As well as Curie, the other double Nobel laureates are John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger, the committee noted.
After the announcement, video on social media showed Dr. Meldal, who is Danish, being met with applause and cheers at the University of Copenhagen, where he is a professor.
The chemistry prize is the third Nobel given this week, after the awards in physiology or medicine on Monday and in physics on Tuesday. The prizes are among the highest honors in science.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2021?
The prize was awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan for their development of a tool that spurred research into new drugs and reduced chemistry’s effect on the environment.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize in the sciences this year?
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
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The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah won for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
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The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, both journalists, won for their efforts to protect press freedoms.
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Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.
All of the prize announcements will also be streamed live by the Nobel Prize institution. Prize winners will receive their awards at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.