Bertozzi, Meldal and Sharpless (from left to right), the three scientists who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
□Chutian Metropolis Daily Jimu News reporter Song Qingying
On October 5, local time, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced. American scientists Caroline Bertozzi, Karl Barry Sharpless and Danish scientist Morten Merdahl shared.
Jimu news reporters combed and found that Sharpless had won two Nobel Prizes, but he also paid a huge price for science.
21 years after the Nobel Prize was awarded
Sharpless, the three winners, was born on April 28, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1968.
Sharpless won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. This makes him the second person in history to win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, after Frederick Sanger. Known for his work on asymmetric synthesis, Sharpless named three chemical reactions after Sharpless: catalytic asymmetric epoxidation, dihydroxylation, and ammonia hydroxylation. In 2001, Sharpless, American scientist William Knowles and Japanese scientist Ryoji Noyori won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry of the year for their outstanding contributions to chiral catalytic oxidation reactions. Knowles and Noyori shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Sharpless received the other half. In recent years he has introduced the new concept of click chemistry, which has become one of the most useful and attractive synthetic concepts in many fields of drug development and molecular biology. Based on his outstanding contributions to click chemistry, an analysis company once predicted that he would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the second time, and this prediction turned out to be true in 2022.
Blind in one eye due to experiment
But Sharpless, a chemist, has unfortunately lost an eye.
The misfortune happened in an experiment shortly after Sharpless had landed an assistant professor position at MIT in 1970. One early morning, as he was getting ready to go home from the lab, he wanted to go to the cubicle to see what his colleagues were doing, where a first-year graduate student was flame-sealing an MRI tube. Sharpless picked up the MRI tube and observed the light. Unexpectedly, the test tube was foggy. After Sharpless wiped the test tube, he noticed that the solvent content was very high. Suddenly, the solvent level dropped a few inches.
“Although I immediately realized that the concentrated oxygen had been sealed in the MRI tube, I really couldn’t move it until it exploded.” The MRI tube exploded, and shards of glass shattered the cornea of one of Sharpless’s eyes. , penetrated the retina and caused a partial puncture of the eyeball. His injured eye lost functional vision, but luckily his other eye had full vision.
Sharpless later wrote this experience into a short article, and now the article called “Cautionary Stories from the Past” is still on MIT’s official website, reminding researchers to wear safety goggles at all times.
Female chemistry geniuses are also rock queens
The Nobel Prize website’s comment on the chemistry prize is: “Sometimes the simple answer is the best. Sharpless and Meldal brought chemistry into the age of functionalism and laid the foundation for click chemistry, Bertolt Qi took click chemistry to a new dimension and started using it to map cells. Her bioorthogonal reactions now contribute to more targeted cancer therapy, among many other applications.”
Caroline Bertozzi, the only woman among the three winners, is a chemist and rock music lover.
Bertozzi was born in October 1966, according to World Science magazine. Her father was a physics professor at MIT, but after she entered Harvard, she wanted to major in music. “My parents didn’t want me to choose that. One of my relatives went into music and ended up working in a bank to pay the rent. I didn’t dare to defy them.”
So Bertozzi took pre-med courses that included math and science courses, and decided to major in biology at the end of her freshman year, but her music career didn’t stop there. While many of her classmates worked as waiters in restaurants to pay for college, she played the keyboard and sang in a heavy metal rock band. It was the 1980s and her band often played their own metal rock or pop songs at events like college parties.