Achieving a Nobel Prize is a difficult feat, but there are people who achieve it not once, but twice, as the American has done today Barry Sharplessboth times in the Chemistry category, but it is not the only one.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has recognized the Americans this Wednesday Barry Sharpless and Carolyn Bertozzi and Dane Morten Meldal for taking this discipline to the era of “functionalism”, with practical applications for industry.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stands out in its motivation for the award “the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry” made by the winners.
The chemical reactions devised by Bertozzi, Meldal and Sharpless (who had already won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001) have facilitated the production of new materials and are now used globally to explore cells and trace biological processes.
Using bioorthogonal reactions, anticancer drugs have also been perfected and are being tested in clinical trials.
While Sharpless and Meldal laid the foundations for a new chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled quickly and efficiently, Bertozzi has taken it to a “new dimension” by applying it to living organisms, the ruling highlights.
Sharpless already knows what it’s like to take the stage at the Konserthuset, the Stockholm Concert Hall where the awards are given, and shake hands with King Carl Gustaf as he receives the award.
He already did it in 2001, when he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on oxidation reactions catalyzed by bats, which opened a new field in the synthesis of molecules. The new award also has to do with two tools to build molecules.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize 2 times?
Marie Skłodowska Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling, and Frederick Sanger They registered their name before Sharpless in the Olympus of doubles prizewinners and some achieved it in different disciplines.
The most famous double winner, and also in two different fields, was the Polish and French nationalized researcher Marie Skłodowska Curie. Her first award was achieved in Physics in 1903 for her research on “the phenomena of radiation” and she achieved it together with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry would be awarded alone in 1911 for the “discovery of the elements radium and polonium, for the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element,” recalls the Nobel Foundation page.
The American Linus Pauling also had two Nobel Prizes to his credit, and he also won them alone in both categories. The first was from Chemistry in 1954 for his research on the nature of chemical bonds.
Pauling, a well-known peace activist, won his second prize in a very different discipline; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for “his fight against the nuclear arms race between East and West.”
The American engineer John Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, both times shared with two other winners. In 1956 he was recognized for his “research on semiconductors and his discovery of the transistor effect” and in 1972 for “the theory of superconductivity”. Two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry were awarded in his lifetime by the British biochemist Frederick Sanger. His work on “the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin” gave him the first award in 1958 and the second would come in 1980 “for his contributions to the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.”
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