Nobel Prize awarded for “click chemistry”

On Wednesday, October 5, in Stockholm, representatives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2022. The laureates were Caroline Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless – “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

“Sometimes the simple answers are the best,” the Nobel Prize website says. – Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal are awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for bringing chemistry to the era of functionalism and laying the foundations of click chemistry. They share the award with Carolyn Bertozzi, who has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started using it for cell mapping. Its bio-orthogonal responses now facilitate more targeted cancer treatment, among many other applications.”

American scientist Barry Sharpless and Dane Morten Meldal laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry called click chemistry, in which molecular building blocks quickly and efficiently combine with each other. And Caroline Bertozzi took click chemistry to a new level and began to use it in living organisms.

Interestingly, 81-year-old Barry Sharpless had already won the 2001 Nobel in Chemistry, sharing the prize with Ryoji Noyori and William Knowles “for research used in the pharmaceutical industry.” It was Sharpless who coined the term “click chemistry” to describe chemical reactions adapted to quickly and reliably obtain chemical substances by connecting individual small elements together.

And Stanford University professor Caroline Bertozzi has already established herself as the winner of a large number of awards, testifying to her achievements in scientific work. Her work covers both chemistry and biology. She coined the term “biorthogonal chemistry” to refer to chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her scientific writings include research into the synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and their impact on diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections such as COVID-19. And Bertozzi is known as an open lesbian.

In anticipation of the announcement of the decision of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, experts, as is being done, tried to predict who could become this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

So, according to a survey of experts conducted by the ChemistryViews website, most experts came to the conclusion that a European or American biochemist will receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022 (well, there is no need to be seven spans in the forehead, since, according to statistics, most Nobel laureates in chemistry – scientists from the United States, in second place are chemists from Germany, in third – from the UK). The most cited areas for awards after Biochemistry are Organic Chemistry, Materials/Polymers and Physical Chemistry.

According to a Chemistry View survey, this year’s prize could be claimed by any biochemist. In this context, the names of the pioneers of biochemistry Franz-Ulrich Hartl and Arthur Horwich were mentioned. Also on the list of candidates was the developer of the AlphaFold program, which performs predictions of the spatial structure of a protein, John Jumper.

Only about 14% of survey participants believe that a woman will be the winner (but they were right). Along with John Jumper, the Polish chemist Janusz Pavlishin and the British scientist of Indian origin, nucleic acid researcher Shankar Balasubramanyan were named the most likely candidates for the laureates.

And the independent company Clarivate Clarivate published as possible winners a list of citation leaders – researchers whose work is included in 0.01% of the most cited publications.

Zhenan Bao of Stanford University (USA) was named a possible recipient for her work on flexible electronics and electronic skin, organic and polymeric electronic materials with applications in soft robotics, prosthetics, artificial intelligence and health monitoring.

Clarivate also recognized American scientists Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University and Peter Greenberg of the University of Washington for their discovery of an intercellular chemical bonding system that allows bacteria to detect and respond to a cell population through gene regulation. Bassler was one of the recipients of the 2022 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, along with bioorthogonal chemistry pioneers Caroline Bertozzi and Benjamin Cravatt, who developed activity-based protein profiling. Wolf Prize winners have often won the Nobel Prize.

Among the possible winners is Daniel Nosera from Harvard University, who is engaged in research on electron transfer using protons. This mechanism is important for many biochemical processes, including photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, and oxygen reduction. Its study may eventually lead to the creation of artificial photosynthetic systems.

The very first Nobel Prize winner in chemistry was the Dutchman Jacob Hendrik van’t Hoff. Since then, from 1901 to 2021, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 113 times – and 187 people received it during this period. In about half of the cases, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to a single laureate, and about the same number of times the award was awarded to two and three scientists.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is accompanied by a gold medal and a cash prize of 10 million crowns (more than 1.1 million US dollars). The charter of the Nobel Foundation states: “The amount of the prize may be divided equally between two works, each of which is considered awarded the prize. If the work to be awarded is created by two or three people, the prize is awarded jointly. In no event shall the prize amount be divided among more than three people.”

Last year, the American scientist David McMillan and his German colleague Benjamin List became “Nobel Prize winners” in chemistry “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.”

Among the laureates there is also the only person who managed to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice: Frederik Sanger was awarded the prize in 1958 and 1980. However, among the awarded chemists there are other “twice-Nobel winners”: for example, the American chemist and activist Linus Pauling received the Nobel in chemistry in 1954, and eight years later, the Peace Prize), and Marie Curie, in addition to the “chemical” award also received an award in physics.

The median age of Nobel Laureates in Chemistry is 58. The youngest person to be awarded is the 35-year-old Frédéric Joliot, who together with his wife Irene Joliot-Curie received the prize in 1935. And the oldest laureate in 2019 was 97-year-old American scientist John Goodenough.

As with the Physics award, the Chemistry Nobel remains a predominantly male award. The female section of award-winning chemists is represented by Marie Curie, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ada Yonath and 2018 awardee Frances Arnold. And in 2020, two women became the owners of the Nobel in Chemistry – French researcher in the field of microbiology, genetics and biochemistry Emmanuelle Charpentier and American biochemist D Jennifer Doudna – for the development of a method for editing the genome. But this year, the “women’s regiment” among the Nobel chemists has arrived.