Good News | Did you meet the Nobel Laureates? This is how they have changed our lives

This week’s Good News bulletin brings you everything you need to know about the people who won the Nobel Awards, the people who – as well as contributing to the significant progress of humanity – can also give us a lesson in humility and determination.

Good News is highlighting the Nobel prizes, though they don’t represent one-off news events, because they reward the slow and broader developments that have reshaped the world we live in.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in equal shares to Carolyn Bertozzi, Stanford University, California, USA; Morton Meldal, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; and Barry Sharpless, Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, USA.

They received the prize for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Click chemistry, coined in 2000, is partly explained by its name. It’s basically snapping molecules together.

They say: imagine if you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then imagine you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation. That’s clicking chemistry.

The other part of the chemistry prize, for the concept of bioorthogonal chemistry, is still in its early phases.

“I think there are probably many new reactions to be discovered and invented,” said Carolyn Bertozzi in a statement.

The biotech industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry – with new approaches to treating and diagnosing diseases – will be strongly impacted by click chemistry, says Bertozzi.

It’s basically a superpower “that opens the door to all kinds of interesting applications.”

Bertozzi says that before the advent of bioorthogonal