TeaHe has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Caroline Bertozzi, Morton Medel and Barry Sharpless honored, the last of which has only won the award twice in a group of five. Three chemists have been awarded for Pioneering ‘Click Chemistry’ Or obtaining molecules that would not normally be bound together to do so in an efficient and simple way. The ‘click’ comes from the analogy of the sharpless draw of molecules snapping together, as airline seatbelts fit into their buckles. Historically, chemistry has tried to imitate nature. From medicine to fertilizer, chemists have sought to create synthetic products that mimic natural molecules. The artificial synthesis of indigo, rather than extraction from plants, had disastrous consequences for the economy of colonial India. On the other hand, many molecules have been synthesized in a simpler way to make drugs and drugs to kill bacteria and relieve pain. The flip side is that these processes are likely to be laborious, creating unwanted by-products, many toxic. Often, the number of intermediary steps is so high and complex that the desired result is usually too expensive to be useful.
Almost immediately after Sharpless won his first Nobel Prize, talks began to create molecular building blocks—like Lego blocks—that could snap together quickly and efficiently. The first breakthrough came when Mendel and Sharpless explored independently of each other what became a cornerstone of click chemistry, namely that copper catalyzes the azide–alkyne cycloaddition. Two types of chemicals – azides and alkynes – react very efficiently when copper ions are added, Meldl discovered in his Copenhagen laboratory, and form a very stable structure called a triazole. Previous attempts to join azides and alkynes were cumbersome, but this time the trick was copper. From then on, if chemists wanted to combine two different molecules, it was only necessary to introduce an azide into one molecule and an alkyne in the other. Then they broke the molecules together with the help of some copper ions. It has now become an industry standard. However, Bertozzi took click chemistry to a new dimension and showed that it could be used in living organisms. Copper is toxic to living cells, but he figured out a way to generate a copper-free click reaction, called strain-promoted azide-alkyne cycloaddition, and showed that it could be used to treat tumors. The awards demonstrate that it pays to rethink a field’s fundamentals and stick to it long enough to spark a revolution.