STOCKHOLM: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 will be shared by three researchers – Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Karl Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal of Denmark – for their research in the field of developing an “ingenious tool for building molecule”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said here on Wednesday.

The Nobel laureautes are being awarded for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry, it said.
The prize will be shared by Carolyn of Stafford University, Morten of the University of Copenhagen and Karl of the Scripps Research Institute in California.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 is about making difficult processes easier. Karl and Morten have laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry – click chemistry – in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. Carolyn has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilising it in living organisms.

Chemists have long been driven by the desire to build increasingly complicated molecules. In pharmaceutical research, this has often involved artificially recreating natural molecules with medicinal properties. This has led to many admirable molecular constructions, but these are generally time consuming and very expensive to produce.

“This year’s (Nobel) 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,” says Johan Aqvist, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.