Barry Sharpless: Two-time chemistry Nobel winner joins the ranks of Marie Curie, Linus Pauling

Barry Sharpless receiving his Nobel in 2001. ( @NobelPrize/Twitter)

American chemist Karl Barry Sharpless, who shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 with Carolyn R. Bertozzi, also from the US, and Denmark's Morten Meldal, is a two-time winner.

He joined the ranks of Polish-French physicist Marie Curie, American chemist Linus Carl Pauling and physicist John Bardeen and English biochemist Frederick Sanger.

Along with Bertozzi and Meldal, Sharpless won this year's Nobel for laying the basis of "click chemistry" -- a functional form of chemistry used in mapping DNA and developing pharmaceuticals.

Click chemistry encompasses reactions "in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently".

Sharpless was first awarded the chemistry Nobel in 2001 for working on "chirally catalysed oxidation reactions”.  The word chiral refers to  molecules that appear in two mirroring forms.

Sharpless is associated with the San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1968.

At the Scripps Institute, the chemist leads the academic group Sharpless Lab.

He had told the Nobel Foundation in 2001 that if he had a crown, its jewels would be the "75-or-so former Sharpless Group members".

"As a group, they hold superior standards for judging the significance of research, and I share with all them all of the glory that is a Nobel Prize," Sharpless had said.

It was in 2002 that the group discovered CuAAC (the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition), which is now populary known as “click chemistry”.