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The 2022 Nobel Prizes

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work ‘Snapping Molecules Together’

Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless were honored for their advances in “click chemistry,” which could have important applications in treating and diagnosing illnesses.

The Nobel committee said that findings by the three scientists had “taken chemistry into the era of functionalism” and were “bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.”
The Nobel committee said that findings by the three scientists had “taken chemistry into the era of functionalism” and were “bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.”Credit...Christine Olsson/TT News Agency, via Associated Press
By Cora Engelbrecht, Euan Ward and Oliver Whang
Oct. 5, 2022
Updated 7:21 a.m. ET
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 — work that has “led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together,” the Nobel committee said.

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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.

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.”

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Shortly after Dr. Sharpless coined the concept, both he and Dr. Meldal independently discovered a chemical reaction called copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, known today as the crown jewel of click chemistry.

What to Know About the Nobel Prizes
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An annual event. Every October, committees in Sweden and Norway name Nobel laureates for their contributions in fields including physics, literature and peace work. This year, the Nobel Prizes will be awarded from Oct. 3 to 10. Here is what to know:

What are the prizes? Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year, each recognizing an individual’s or organization’s groundbreaking contribution to a specific field. Prizes are given for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, economic science, literature and peace work.

When were the awards established? The Nobel Prizes were established after the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other explosives, in 1896. In his will, Nobel bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to create five annual prizes honoring ingenuity.

What do the winners receive? Nobel Prize laureates receive a Nobel Prize diploma, a Nobel Prize medal and a monetary award, which for 2022 is 10 million Swedish krona, or about $900,000 according to current exchange rates, for a full prize.

How do the nominations work? Eligible nominators, which include university professors, scientists, members of national governments and previous Nobel Prize laureates, submit the names of potential candidates each year. Nominations for 2022 had to be submitted by Jan. 31.

Who selects the winners? Four separate institutions are responsible for picking the winners: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, the Karolinska Institute for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Isn’t there a prize for economics? Yes, but it is technically not a Nobel Prize. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was not among the awards originally stipulated in Nobel’s will. The economics prize was established by the Bank of Sweden in 1968; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has been selecting the winners since 1969.

“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.”

Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, was able to apply this reaction to biomolecules, often found on cell surfaces, in living organisms without affecting the chemistry of the cells she was observing. Before her extensive research with glycans, or sugar chains, scientists’ understanding of this subfield of glycobiology had been hampered by an inability to see molecules in action in living cells.

Her work “revolutionized the way we can analyze or see molecules in the living body,” Dr. Ramström said.

By pioneering a method for mapping biomolecules on the surface of cells, Dr. Bertozzi later devised a way to build click reactions, or complex molecules, inside living organisms. These so-called bio-orthogonal reactions have since been applied widely to pharmaceutical developments in cancer, DNA sequencing and material sciences.

“The field of click chemistry is still in its early phases,” Dr. Bertozzi said in a call after the announcement, 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.

She 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.”

“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.

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. 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 after the announcement. “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?
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David W.C. MacMillan, left, and Benjamin List won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Credit...John Minchillo/Associated Press; Soeren Stache/DPA, via Associated Press
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?
The Physiology or Medicine prize was awarded on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist who peered back into human history by retrieving genetic material from 40,000-year-old bones, producing a complete Neanderthal genome and initiating the field of ancient DNA studies.

The physics prize went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on Tuesday for their experiments that pioneered developments in the field of quantum mechanics.

When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
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.”

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.

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.

Cora Engelbrecht is a reporter and story editor on the International desk, based in London. She joined The Times in 2016. @CoraEngelbrecht

Euan Ward is a reporter on the International desk and a 2022-2023 New York Times Fellow. He is based in London, and previously worked as a Middle East correspondent and investigative reporter in Beirut. @euanward_

Oliver Whang is a reporting fellow for The Times, focusing on science and health. @oliverwhang21