Karl Barry Sharpless (born April 28, 1941) is an American chemist. 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".[1][2] 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).
Early life and education
Sharpless was born April 28, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[3] His childhood was filled with summers at his family cottage on the Manasquan River in New Jersey. This is where Sharpless developed a love for fishing that he would continue throughout his life, spending summers in college working on fishing boats.[4] He graduated from Friends' Central School in 1959,[5] and continued his studies at Dartmouth College, earning an A.B. in 1963. Sharpless originally planned to attend medical school after his undergraduate degree, but his research professor convinced him to continue his education in chemistry.[6] He earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Stanford University in 1968 under Eugene van Tamelen.[7] He continued post-doctoral work at Stanford University (1968–1969) with James P. Collman, working on organometallic chemistry. Sharpless then moved to Harvard University (1969–1970), studying enzymology in Konrad E. Bloch's lab.[6]
Academic career
Sharpless was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1970–1977, 1980–1990) and Stanford University (1977–1980).[8] While at Stanford, Sharpless discovered Sharpless asymmetric epoxidation, which was used to make (+)-disparlure.
Research
Sharpless developed stereoselective oxidation reactions, and showed that the formation of an inhibitor with femtomolar potency can be catalyzed by the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, beginning with an azide and an alkyne. He discovered several chemical reactions which have transformed asymmetric synthesis from science fiction to the relatively routine, including aminohydroxylation, dihydroxylation, and the Sharpless asymmetric epoxidation.[9]
In 2001 he was awarded a half-share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, Sharpless oxyamination). The other half of the year's Prize was shared between William S. Knowles and Ryōji Noyori (for their work on stereoselective hydrogenation).[10]
The term "click chemistry" was coined by Sharpless in 1998, and was first fully described by Sharpless, Hartmuth Kolb, and M.G. Finn at The Scripps Research Institute in 2001.[11][12] This involves a set of highly selective, exothermic reactions which occur under mild conditions; the most successful example is the azide alkyne Huisgen cycloaddition to form 1,2,3-triazoles.[13]
As of 2022, Sharpless has an h-index of 180 according to Google Scholar[citation needed] and of 124 according to Scopus.[14]
Awards and honors
Sharpless is a two-time Nobel Laureate. He is a recipient of the 2001 and 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on "chirally catalysed oxidation reactions", and "click chemistry", respectively.[2][15]
In 2019, Sharpless was awarded the Priestley medal, the American Chemical Society's highest honor, for "the invention of catalytic, asymmetric oxidation methods, the concept of click chemistry and development of the copper-catalyzed version of the azide-acetylene cycloaddition reaction.".[5][6] He received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Chemists in 2023.[16]
He is Distinguished University Professor at Kyushu University. He holds honorary degrees from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (1995), Technical University of Munich (1995), Catholic University of Louvain (1996) and Wesleyan University (1999).[8]
Personal life
Sharpless married Jan Dueser in 1965 and they have three children.[9] He was blinded in one eye during a lab accident in 1970 where an NMR tube exploded, shortly after he arrived at MIT as an assistant professor. After this accident, Sharpless stresses "there's simply never an adequate excuse for not wearing safety glasses in the laboratory at all times."[17]
References
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved October 5, 2022.
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved October 5, 2022.
"K. Barry Sharpless | Biography, Nobel Prize, & Facts | Britannica". britannica.com. Retrieved October 14, 2022.
Sharpless, Barry (December 8, 2001). "Searching For New Reactivity" (PDF). Nobel Prize.
"2019 Priestley Medalist K. Barry Sharpless works magic in the world of molecules". Chemical & Engineering News. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
"K. Barry Sharpless named 2019 Priestley Medalist". Chemical & Engineering News. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
Sharpless, Karl Barry (1968). Studies of the mechanism of action of 2,3-oxidosqualene-lanosterol cyclase: featuring enzymic cyclization of modified squalene oxides (Ph.D.). Stanford University. OCLC 66229398. ProQuest 302369766.
Henderson, Andrea Kovacs (2009). American Men & Women of Science. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Cengage Learning. pp. 764. ISBN 9781414433066.
"K. Barry Sharpless". Notable Names Database. Soylent Communications. 2014. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001". Nobelprize.org. The Nobel Foundation. 2001. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
Kolb, Hartmuth C.; Finn, M. G.; Sharpless, K. Barry (June 1, 2001). "Click Chemistry: Diverse Chemical Function from a Few Good Reactions". Angewandte Chemie. 40 (11): 2004–2021. doi:10.1002/1521-3773(20010601)40:11<2004::AID-ANIE2004>3.0.CO;2-5. ISSN 1521-3773. PMID 11433435.
"ScienceWatch.com - Clarivate". archive.sciencewatch.com. Retrieved October 5, 2022.
Evans, Richard A. (2007). "The Rise of Azide–Alkyne 1,3-Dipolar 'Click' Cycloaddition and its Application to Polymer Science and Surface Modification". Australian Journal of Chemistry. 60 (6): 384. doi:10.1071/CH06457. ISSN 0004-9425.
"Scopus preview – Sharpless, K. Barry – Author details – Scopus". www.scopus.com. Retrieved October 16, 2021.
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved April 5, 2019.
"American Institute of Chemists – Gold Medal Awards". www.theaic.org. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
"A cautionary tale from the past". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. March 11, 1992. Retrieved October 5, 2022.
External links
Scholia has a profile for Karl Barry Sharpless (Q110925).
K. Barry Sharpless at The Scripps Research Institute
Karl Barry Sharpless on Nobelprize.org Edit this at Wikidata including the Nobel Lecture December 8, 2001 The Search for New Chemical Reactivity and the award 2022
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1901–1925
1901: Jacobus van 't Hoff 1902: Emil Fischer 1903: Svante Arrhenius 1904: William Ramsay 1905: Adolf von Baeyer 1906: Henri Moissan 1907: Eduard Buchner 1908: Ernest Rutherford 1909: Wilhelm Ostwald 1910: Otto Wallach 1911: Marie Curie 1912: Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier 1913: Alfred Werner 1914: Theodore Richards 1915: Richard Willstätter 1916 1917 1918: Fritz Haber 1919 1920: Walther Nernst 1921: Frederick Soddy 1922: Francis Aston 1923: Fritz Pregl 1924 1925: Richard Zsigmondy
1926–1950
1926: Theodor Svedberg 1927: Heinrich Wieland 1928: Adolf Windaus 1929: Arthur Harden / Hans von Euler-Chelpin 1930: Hans Fischer 1931: Carl Bosch / Friedrich Bergius 1932: Irving Langmuir 1933 1934: Harold Urey 1935: Frédéric Joliot-Curie / Irène Joliot-Curie 1936: Peter Debye 1937: Norman Haworth / Paul Karrer 1938: Richard Kuhn 1939: Adolf Butenandt / Leopold Ružička 1940 1941 1942 1943: George de Hevesy 1944: Otto Hahn 1945: Artturi Virtanen 1946: James B. Sumner / John Northrop / Wendell Meredith Stanley 1947: Robert Robinson 1948: Arne Tiselius 1949: William Giauque 1950: Otto Diels / Kurt Alder
1951–1975
1951: Edwin McMillan / Glenn T. Seaborg 1952: Archer Martin / Richard Synge 1953: Hermann Staudinger 1954: Linus Pauling 1955: Vincent du Vigneaud 1956: Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov 1957: Alexander Todd 1958: Frederick Sanger 1959: Jaroslav Heyrovský 1960: Willard Libby 1961: Melvin Calvin 1962: Max Perutz / John Kendrew 1963: Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta 1964: Dorothy Hodgkin 1965: Robert Woodward 1966: Robert S. Mulliken 1967: Manfred Eigen / Ronald Norrish / George Porter 1968: Lars Onsager 1969: Derek Barton / Odd Hassel 1970: Luis Federico Leloir 1971: Gerhard Herzberg 1972: Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein 1973: Ernst Otto Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson 1974: Paul Flory 1975: John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog
1976–2000
1976: William Lipscomb 1977: Ilya Prigogine 1978: Peter D. Mitchell 1979: Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig 1980: Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger 1981: Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann 1982: Aaron Klug 1983: Henry Taube 1984: Robert Merrifield 1985: Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle 1986: Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi 1987: Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen 1988: Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel 1989: Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech 1990: Elias Corey 1991: Richard R. Ernst 1992: Rudolph A. Marcus 1993: Kary Mullis / Michael Smith 1994: George Olah 1995: Paul J. Crutzen / Mario Molina / F. Sherwood Rowland 1996: Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley 1997: Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou 1998: Walter Kohn / John Pople 1999: Ahmed Zewail 2000: Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa
2001–present
2001: William Knowles / Ryoji Noyori / K. Barry Sharpless 2002: John B. Fenn / Koichi Tanaka / Kurt Wüthrich 2003: Peter Agre / Roderick MacKinnon 2004: Aaron Ciechanover / Avram Hershko / Irwin Rose 2005: Robert H. Grubbs / Richard R. Schrock / Yves Chauvin 2006: Roger D. Kornberg 2007: Gerhard Ertl 2008: Osamu Shimomura / Martin Chalfie / Roger Y. Tsien 2009: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan / Thomas A. Steitz / Ada E. Yonath 2010: Richard F. Heck / Akira Suzuki / Ei-ichi Negishi 2011: Dan Shechtman 2012: Robert Lefkowitz / Brian Kobilka 2013: Martin Karplus / Michael Levitt / Arieh Warshel 2014: Eric Betzig / Stefan Hell / William E. Moerner 2015: Tomas Lindahl / Paul L. Modrich / Aziz Sancar 2016: Jean-Pierre Sauvage / Fraser Stoddart / Ben Feringa 2017: Jacques Dubochet / Joachim Frank / Richard Henderson 2018: Frances Arnold / Gregory Winter / George Smith 2019: John B. Goodenough / M. Stanley Whittingham / Akira Yoshino 2020: Emmanuelle Charpentier / Jennifer Doudna 2021: David MacMillan / Benjamin List 2022: Carolyn R. Bertozzi / Morten P. Meldal / Karl Barry Sharpless 2023: Moungi G. Bawendi / Louis E. Brus / Alexei I. Ekimov
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