The University of La Laguna has congratulated the researcher Karl Barry Sharpless, awarded this Wednesday with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and who was awarded an honorary doctorate on April 29 of this year by the academic center, with which he maintains “collaboration ties since decades ago.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the three winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless, the latter awarded for the second time, since he already obtained it in 2001, he recalled the University of La Laguna in a statement.
During his words of praise at Sharpless’s investiture as Doctor Honoris Causa, the professor of the Department of Organic Chemistry at the University of La Laguna, Víctor Sotero Martín García, recalled his time in the laboratory that the American chemist had at Stanford University, working a fruitful scientific relationship since 1980.
He also reviewed the extensive career of Sharpless, who has been linked to Stanford and Harvard universities and the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology (MIT) and Scripps in California, where he has held the WM Keck chair in chemistry since 1990.
On that occasion, Martín related Sharpless’s conception of chemistry with his training in the Quaker school during his childhood, valuing the notion of being useful.
This led him to develop the concept of “click chemistry”, understood as modular reactions that originate by joining small units together and allows substances to be generated quickly, and for which he has obtained this second Nobel Prize.
This concept supposes a methodology that Professor Martín considers “groundbreaking due to its simplicity”, since it makes it easy to work and is very useful for research at the level of biological systems.
He received the first Nobel Prize for his advances in so-called “asymmetric chemistry”, said the professor at the University of La Laguna, who considers the award-winning chemist “one of my scientific fathers”.
