Stanford Professor Carolyn Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize.
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.
“Click chemistry is almost like it sounds,” he said of a field whose name 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.”
Bertozzi 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.
“These are areas that will be very strongly impacted by click chemistry, and they already have been,” said Bertozzi, who earned her doctorate in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. Aqvist noted that click chemistry “can now be used for building drug molecules, polymers, new materials and many other things.”
While she said that she had not yet had time to consider how to use the award money, Bertozzi noted that “to the extent that the prize casts a light on chemical biology, that’s a wonderful thing.”
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