Chemists called for the Nobel Prize - Newspaper Kommersant No. 185 (7386) of 10/06/2022
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to the creators of tools that make it possible to obtain "given molecules under any conditions" - the developers of "click chemistry". The $1.1 million award will be shared by American chemists Caroline Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless, as well as their Danish colleague Morten Meldal. The Nobel Committee explained that the discovery of scientists allows "quickly and efficiently" to connect "molecular building blocks", which is relevant, for example, in pharmaceuticals. The group of Barry Sharpless researchers included the Russian scientist Valery Fokin, whom Thompson Reuters experts had previously predicted for the award, but he did not become a laureate. While Mr. Sharpless received the award for the second time.
“A click and the molecules stick together,” explained on website The Nobel Committee is the essence of discoveries, the developers of which were awarded a prestigious award. The committee's communiqué says that chemists have long been trying to create complex artificial molecules, including those with medicinal properties. “This has led to amazing molecular designs, but they tend to be time consuming and expensive to manufacture,” lament the Nobel Committee. The 2022 prize is actually awarded for efforts to simplify these complex processes. “Functional molecules can even be built in a direct way,” explained Johan Okvist, head of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
81-year-old Barry Sharpless (full name Carl Barry Sharpless) from the California company Scripps Research in 2000 came up with the concept of "click chemistry" for this purpose.
"This is a form of simple and reliable chemistry where reactions proceed quickly and unwanted by-products are excluded," the Nobel Committee's communiqué explains.
In 2002, Mr. Sharpless and 68-year-old professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Morten Meldal, independently discovered the reaction, called in a committee press release "the pearl of click chemistry," the catalysis of copper in the azide-alkyne cycloaddition reaction. This "elegant and efficient chemical reaction" is widely used in drug development and in the study of DNA, the Nobel Committee added.
It is noteworthy that the group of the Danish scientist was the first to discover the reaction (by conducting research on peptides in organic solvents), but at first they did not find it promising. Whereas Barry Sharpless's group concluded that the new reaction achieves "unprecedented levels of selectivity, reliability and applicability."
If Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal laid the foundation for "click chemistry" (when "molecular building blocks quickly and efficiently connect to each other"), then the American Caroline Bertozzi took this process to a new level.
Bertozzi, a 55-year-old professor at Stanford University, has studied "elusive biomolecules on the surface of cells" and has developed "click reactions that work inside living organisms," the prize said in a communiqué. We are talking about the so-called bioorthogonal reactions, which are used to study cells: with their help, in particular, pharmacists have been able to improve the targeting of drugs to cancer cells. “Click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions brought chemistry into the era of functionalism,” bringing “the greatest benefit to mankind,” the Nobel Committee stressed.
It is noteworthy that the Russian chemist Valery Fokin was part of the Barry Sharpless research team. It was he who discovered the reaction of copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition in water in the presence of ascorbic acid.
In 2013, Thompson Reuters experts even named Mr. Fokin, along with Barry Sharpless, candidates for the Nobel Prize.
However, Mr. Fokin was not among the laureates, while Mr. Sharpless received it for the second time. In 2001, an American scientist was awarded with two colleagues for the creation of "chiral catalysts for redox reactions" (research used in pharmaceuticals).
Dmitry Perekalin, head of the laboratory at the Institute of Organoelement Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the laureates "natural and expected", but emphasized that Valery Fokin made a decisive contribution to the development of "click chemistry". “Perhaps the foreign policy situation interfered in the process of selecting candidates for the award,” Mr. Perekalin suggested in an interview with TASS. However, in 2015, Valery Fokin left for the United States and now holds the position of professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. According to Mr. Perekalin, "click chemistry" approaches are now actively used to attach fluorescent labels to molecules in living cells, while Valery Fokin's developments are used in the production and modification of polymers.
The Nobel Prize will be awarded on December 10 in Stockholm: the laureates will share 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million). The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901. It was awarded to the Dutchman Jacob Hendrik van't Hoff for discovering the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions. Among the Soviet and Russian laureates, in 1956 only Nikolai Semenov received the award in chemistry (for developing the theory of chain reactions). In 2021, the award in this field got German and American scientists Benjamin List and David Macmillan for developing the process of asymmetric organocatalysis.