Karl Barry Sharpless

American chemist and Nobel Laureate (born 1941)

AI overview

Karl Barry Sharpless is an American chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of methods that allow chemists to build molecules with precise control over their structure. His work has made it easier and more efficient to create useful compounds in fields like medicine and materials science.

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Quotes

“We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.”
“...when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.”
“The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.”

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Article

Karl Barry Sharpless (born April 28, 1941) is an American stereochemist. He is a two-time Nobel laureate in chemistry, known for his work on stereoselective reactions and click chemistry.

Sharpless was awarded half of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions", and one third of the 2022 prize, jointly with Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Morten P. Meldal, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry". Sharpless is the fifth person (in addition to two organizations) to have twice been awarded a Nobel prize, along with Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger, and the third to have been awarded two prizes in the same discipline (after Bardeen and Sanger).