The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Nobel Prize for 3 chemists who made molecules ‘click’

STOCKHOLM • Three scientists were jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.

Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal were cited for their work on click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions.

“It’s all about snapping molecules together,” said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that announced the winners at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Sharpless, 81, who previously won a Nobel Prize in 2001 and is now the fifth person to receive the award twice, first proposed the idea of connecting molecules using chemical “buckles” around the turn of the millennium, Aqvist said.

“The problem was to find good chemical buckles. They have to react with each other easily and specifically.”

Meldal, 68, based at the University of Copenhagen and Sharpless, who is affiliated with Scripps Research in California, independently found the first such candidates that would easily snap together with each other but not with other molecules, leading to applications in the manufacture of medicines and polymers.

Bertozzi, 55, who is based at Stanford University “took click chemistry to a new level,” the Nobel panel said, by finding a way to make the process work inside living organisms without disrupting them.

The goal is “doing chemistry inside human patients to make sure that drugs go to the right place and stay away from the wrong place,” she said, speaking by phone at a news conference following the announcement.

The award was a shock, she said. “I’m still not entirely positive that it’s real, but it’s getting realer by the minute.”

Later, speaking to The Associated Press by Zoom, Bertozzi said one of the first people she called after being wakened by the call around 2 a.m. was her father, William Bertozzi, a retired physicist and night owl, who was still awake watching TV.

“Dad, turn down the TV, I have something to tell you,” she said she told him. After she assured him nothing was wrong, he guessed the news. “You won it, didn’t you?”

One of three daughters, Bertozzi said she was “fortunate because I grew up with parents that were very supportive, evangelical almost, about having their girls participate in the sciences.”

Bertozzi, who is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports AP’S Health and Science Department, said she was grateful for the energy and enthusiasm that a Nobel Prize win will inject into the field.

Meldal said he received the call from the Nobel panel about half an hour before the public announcement. “They ... told me not to tell anyone,” he told the AP, adding that he just sat in his office, shaking a bit. “This is a huge honor.”

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2022-10-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/281578064555368

The Gazette, Colorado Springs