The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless, who have made outstanding contributions to the fields of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Among them, K. Barry Sharpless, awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize twice, is actually an old friend of Tianjin University.
In 2017, invited by Jay Siegel the then Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Professor K. Barry Sharpless visited Tianjin University to share his latest research in the field of click chemistry. However, this friendship has already began in 2008.
On November 18th and 19th, 2008, Professor Sharpless came to Tianjin University to conduct academic exchange. During the two days, he communicated with the faculty and students face to face in the form of lectures, symposiums and seminars, sharing his experience on the road to Nobel Prize and scientific research process.
In addition, a special report on scientific research methods and innovation was presented, entitled “How to Find New Things”, in which Professor Sharpless talked about his values and methodology developed over decades of research. He also pointed out that we’re not supposed to be afraid of the failure in science and the time lost because of it, but learn how to “fail with gains”. That is to say, the ability to make quick attempts after a failure needs to be practiced repeatedly and researchers should keep a sharp sense of the accidents in the experiment, for many great scientific creations happen by chance when scientists are looking for something else.
Prof Sharpless stresses that the intensity in proving a scientific hypothesis is irrelevant to whether it is true. He also mentioned that the “KISS” principle of “Keep It Simple, Stupid” should be followed in the research process. The subconscious behavior of explaining experimental phenomena with complex theories is against the habits of human mind.
At this symposium, Professor Sharpless was appointed as Honorary Professor of Tianjin University.
On February 24, 2017, Professor Sharpless visited Tianjin University again, together with four other Nobel laureates, and shared his recent research progress in the field of click chemistry with the faculty and students of Tianjin University. As an honorary professor ofTianjin University, he expressed his emotion for Tianjin University during his second visit. Years later, Sharpless could still recall the favor by students here for his topic, who once asked him that, “Can you give us a general idea of how to find the latest news and important information?” In his opinion, students in Tianjin University and their questions were both great.
In his second visit, Sharpless shared his ongoing research, which focused on “click chemistry” with the cycloaddition of azide and alkyne, with whom he won the Nobel Chemistry Prize again in 2022, and SuFEx.
The soul of synthetic chemistry is to create chemical entities with high efficiency and selectivity. Pioneered by Professor Sharpless, “click chemistry” is an efficient approach for fragment assembly, which specifically recognizing functional groups on macromolecules for further modifications with high reactivity and selectivity., providing a smart way ofdecorating biological macromolecules. SuFEx introduced by Professor Sharpless in his lecture is a new method for the synthesis of fluorosulfate, which uses mature and commercial sulfur-fluorine compounds to accurately and efficiently form covalent bonds between small molecular probes and protein macromolecules with a complex 3D structure. In his report, Professor Sharpless highlighted the important role that this reaction plays in combining the active ingredients of small molecule anti-cancer drugs. It is found that the sulfuric acid bond inserted through the SuFEx is very similar to the common phosphate in organisms in functional structure, with the difference of only one proton. And sulfur atom as a mediator also has good affinity with biological molecules.
Sharpless also said during the visit that Chinese students had the ability to build the country and the ones he met were very good, being fully capable of conducting the best research in the world. And he also noted that interdisciplinary research can easily uncover problems that have not been discovered in a certain field, for the process of obtaining things from nature and carrying out scientific research were interconnected. Therefore, he believed that working in different departments and disciplines and actively developing academic exchanges were also conducive to integrating existing knowledge to find gaps in scientific research.
By: Lv Qiuhe
Editor: Qin Mian
