Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and Barry Sharpless were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering reactions that allow molecular building blocks to snap together to create new desired compounds efficiently.
The award-giving body said in a statement on Wednesday that the technologies known as click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry are now used globally to explore cells and track biological processes.
“Using bioorthogonal reactions, researchers have improved the targeting of cancer pharmaceuticals, which are now being tested in clinical trials,” it added.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize on Wednesday, worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($915,000).
The third of six consecutive weekdays of Nobel Prize announcements, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.
Past chemistry winners include well-known scientific names like Marie Curie, who also won the physics prize with her husband and whose eldest daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won the chemistry award just over 20 years after her mother.
Scottish-born David MacMillan and German Benjamin List won the 2021 chemistry award for their work in developing new tools to build molecules, assisting in the development of new drugs as well as products such as plastics.
The Nobel Prizes in Science, Literature, and Peace were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman who was also a chemist, and have been awarded since 1901. Economics was later added.
The awards have been given out year after year, with a few exceptions for the world wars, and there was no break for the COVID-19 pandemic, though much of the pageantry and events were put on hold or temporarily moved online.
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