A woman who happens to be gay has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I have had considerable interest in the analytical chemistry of glycans and thus have had general interest in the work of Carolyn Bertozzi. I've attended some of her lectures in connection with mass spectrometry.
She has long been a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and won it for the invention of "click chemistry," high yield fast reactions. (I attended a lecture on the subject of click chemistry today has luck would have it, but not one by the three scientists who won it.)
She shared the prize with Barry Sharpless - who won a previous Nobel for his work on chiral synthesis - and Morten Meldal.
It's pretty general knowledge that the remarkable Dr. Bertozzi is a gay woman, which has nothing to do with her work. Frankly I was more interested in her lab's work on analytical chemistry than I was on her work on click chemistry, with which I have had only passing familiarity.
An article on the subject of her prize is in Nature: Chemists who invented revolutionary ‘click’ reactions win Nobel
Excerpts:
Barry Sharpless at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and Morten Meldal at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark laid the foundation for click chemistry and independently discovered a pivotal reaction that could be used to link two molecules — an azide and an alkyne — with relative ease1,2,3. This reaction has been applied to develop a host of different molecules, including modified plastics and potential pharmaceuticals.
The third winner, Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University in California, used click chemistry to map the complex sugar-based polymers called glycans on the surface of living cells without disturbing cell function4. To do this, she developed reactions called bioorthogonal reactions, which are now being used to aid cancer drug development...
...In 2003, Bertozzi returned from a conference with an idea for dispensing with copper by using alkynes that have been constrained into a ring, says Nicholas Agard, a senior scientist at Genentech in South San Francisco who was a graduate student in Bertozzi’s group at the time. The ring bends the alkyne out of its normal linear form, placing it under strain. “The question was: is that energy releasable in an effective way?” he says.
Agard spent hours digging around in the library looking for some precedent for the idea that ring strain could be harnessed for a non-toxic form of click chemistry. He eventually found a 40-year-old paper written in German that seemed to have some relevance. “I could understand three things in it: ‘phenyl azide’, ‘cyclooctyne’, and ‘explosion’,” he says.
But Agard and his colleagues were able to find a nonexplosive way to harness ring strain for click chemistry, and the lab set about applying the technique to label cells in zebrafish and mice. It was an exciting time, says Pamela Chang, a chemical biologist who earned her PhD in Bertozzi’s lab in 2010. “We knew we were part of something special,” she says. “It made for a really amazing environment for all of us.”
By then, Bertozzi was busy traveling to give talks and running a large research group, but made time to meet with lab members and help them edit their papers. She is an advocate for women in science and, in particular, a role model for female chemists, says Chang, who notes that at one point 50% of the lab’s members were women — an unusually high proportion in the chemistry department at the time.
“She gave us a lot of freedom,” says Chang, who now uses click-chemistry approaches in her own research on bacterial enzymes and metabolism in gut microbiomes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “If you needed advice or help, she would drop everything and make time for you...”
I added the bold.
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