Stockholm: This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R Bertozzi, Morten Meldl, and K. Barry Sharpless for developing a method of ‘simultaneous fragmentation of molecules into equal parts’.
Hans Allegren, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the winners on Wednesday at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. His work is known as click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions. It is used for making cancer drugs, mapping DNA, and making materials tailored for a specific purpose.
Bertozzi is based at Stanford University in California, Meldl is from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Sharpless is affiliated with Scripps Research in California. Sharpless previously won the Nobel Prize in 2001. He is the fifth person to receive the award twice.
The week of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday with a medical award honoring the scientist who uncovered the secrets of Neanderthal DNA.
On Tuesday, three scientists jointly won the Physics Prize for showing that tiny particles can maintain a relationship with each other even when separated.
