Nobel committee awards chemistry prize to scientist trio

Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless and Danish scientist Morten Meldal received the Nobel Prize on Wednesday for their work on “click” chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions. The scientists developed ways of “snapping molecules together,” according to Johan Aqvist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The new conjoined molecules can be used to make cancer drugs, map DNA, and create materials that are tailored to a specific purpose.

Who else received awards? Monday’s award for medicine/physiology went to Svante Pääbo for his work tracing the history of the genomes of humans and Neanderthals. Tuesday’s award for physics went to three physicists—Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser, and Austrian Anton Zeilinger—for their work in quantum information sciences, studying specifically the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Nobel awards come with prize money of about $900,000.

Dig deeper: Read Heather Frank’s report in WORLD magazine about scientists growing synthetic mice embryos.