The winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and Barry Sharpless. The award was given "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry." The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor (about 896,000 US dollars) and it will be shared among the winners.
Click chemistry is a very simple and ingenious approach that allows the formation of molecules just by making them join together very easily, "snapping" together like a belt buckle. Meldal and Sharpless independently discovered molecules that work just like that, and are now employed in drug manufacturing.
Sharpless previously won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2001. Bertozzi saw the potential of using the click chemistry approach to attach "molecular trackers" to interesting molecules and follow them into cells. That required the discovery of click reactions that were not toxic to cells. The field she started is now known as biorthogonal chemistry.
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