Morten Meldal, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, and K. Barry Sharpless have been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm for their “development of  click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

Last year’s chemistry Nobel Prize was given to scientists Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan for discovering a cleaner way to build molecules. The 2020 award was given to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for their discovery of the gene editing technology tool CRISPR-Cas9, which makes genome editing faster, cheaper and more accurate. 

The award winners will be given a diploma, a gold medal and roughly $900,000 as recognition for their contributions to chemistry. 

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Who is Morten Meldal?

Morten P. Meldal is a Danish chemist born in 1954 in Denmark. He is currently employed at the University of Copenhagen as a professor of chemistry. 

The 68-year-old professor graduated from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) with a Bachelor’s of Science in Chemical Engineering before going on to do his Ph.D at the same place. 

Between 1983 and 1988, Meldal worked as a independent research associate at DTU. In 1985, he worked on his postdoctoral research at Cambridge University, ending the work the following year. 

At the beginning of his career, Meldal developed many technological techniques and instruments for peptide synthesis. Some of these technologies are used to characterize the immunity response to cancer-related mucins, a type of protein produced by the tissue of animals. 

The Nobel Prize was a three-way tie between the three scientists. Meldal was awarded the prize for his work on

copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition. The process is used in the “development of pharmaceuticals, mapping DNA and creating materials that are more fit for the purpose,” according to a press release from the Nobel Prize organisation.