The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 has been awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”.

 “This year’s Prize in Chemistry deals with not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple. Functional molecules can be built even by taking a straightforward route,” said Johan Åqvist, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry while announcing the awards. 

According to the Swedish committee, Carolyn Bertozzi has been awarded the 2022 NobelPrize in Chemistry for taking click chemistry to a new dimension and utilising it in living organisms. Her bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell.

Meanwhile, the 2022 NobelPrize laureates in chemistry Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal have laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry – click chemistry – in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently.

Also, Barry Sharpless just become the fifth individual to be awarded two Nobel Prizes.  He was awarded the chemistry prize in 2001 and 2022. He follows in the footsteps of double NobelPrize laureates John Bardeen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger.

The 2021 chemistry award was won by German Benjamin List and Scottish-born David MacMillan for their work in creating new tools to build molecules, aiding in the development of new drugs as well as in areas such as plastics.

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Past chemistry winners include well-known scientific names such as Marie Curie, who also shared the physics prize with her husband and whose eldest daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won the chemistry award just over two decades after her mother.

According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the prize awarded is worth 10 million Swedish crowns. The third of the prizes unveiled over six consecutive weekdays, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.


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