One of the 2022 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners is already a Nobel laureate

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by three chemists working on “click chemistry”—a concept that won one of them the 2001 Nobel prize.

On Wednesday (Oct. 5), the prestigious award went to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” This is Sharpless’ second Nobel win, after he scored the 2001 Prize “for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions.”

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Sharpless coined the term click chemistry, used to describe “a group of reactions that are fast, simple to use, easy to purify, versatile, regiospecific, and give high product yields.” Bertozzi, who applied click chemistry to living organisms, came up with the term “bioorthogonal chemistry” in 2003. Both concepts prove useful in pharmaceuticals and disease studies, among other applications.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo on Oct. 3 and three quantum physicists, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, bagged the honor in physics yesterday (Oct. 4). The literature and peace prizes will follow over the next two days, with economics closing the year’s series on Oct 10. All the announcements will be livestreamed.

Each winner will get a medal, a diploma, and 10 million Swedish krona ($901,608).

Chemistry Nobel Prize predictions were spot on

Various polls on Twitter were making calculated guesses ahead of the announcement, and some of these predictions proved accurate.

Chemistry Nobel Prize winners in the last decade

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The Chemistry Prize, by the digits

113: Nobel Prizes in Chemistry awarded between 1901 and 2021

188: People who’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1901 and 2021

7: Women who’ve won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

5: Individuals who’ve won two Nobel Prizes

35: Age of the youngest chemistry prize laureate Frédéric Joliot, who won the prize in 1935, together with his wife, Irène Joliot-Curie (the daughter of Marie and Peter Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903)

97: Age of the oldest Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, John B. Goodenough. He is also the oldest laureate to be awarded in all prize categories.

Person of interest: Frederick Sanger

Before Sharpless, UK-based Frederick Sanger was the only laureate who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice. The first time was in 1958 for his work on the structure of the insulin molecule. Next, he won it in 1980 jointly with Walter Gilbert, “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.”

Brief history of the Nobel Prize

Nov. 27, 1895: The will of Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist Alfred Nobel, most famously credited with inventing dynamite, sets aside the largest share of his fortune to create a series of prizes. His assets—including holdings in Russian oil company Baku Petroleum and a hundred or so ammunition and dynamite factories around the world, a yacht, a stud farm, three apartments scattered around in Europe, and more—amounted to 31 million Swedish krona

June 29, 1900: The Nobel Foundation is established to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes

Dec. 10, 1901: The first Nobel Prizes are awarded. There were five categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace

1968: Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, marks its 300th anniversary with a donation to the Nobel Foundation to establish the Prize in Economic Sciences

Quotable

“It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not,” —Nobel’s will

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