Smartless he is not, clicked again, he has

As far as names go, K Barry Sharpless has to undoubtedly be a top contender to win the Nobel Prize for Irony this year. The biochemist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, is anything but sharpless as he - along with Stanford University's Carolyn R Bertozzi and University of Copenhagen's Morten Meldal - wins the Nobel for Chemistry this year for his work in 'click chemistry'. Not only that. Sharpless joins four other persons in the history of the Nobel Prize to have been awarded the award twice, the first time around in 2001 for his work on 'chirally catalysed oxidation reactions' - let's just say for making earlier thought speculative and near-impossible chemical reactions possible. Sharpless joins Marie Curie (physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911), Linus Pauling (chemistry in 1954, peace in 1962), Frederic Sanger (both chemistry in 1958 and 1980) and John Bardeen (both physics in 1956 and 1972) in Super-Smart list of Nobel bracers.

That Sharpless, Bertozzi and Meldal together clicked to lay the foundations of creating special chemical structures is not just about playing science with the equivalent of Lego set pieces. Their work has led to practical breakthroughs in targeted cancer treatment. 'Click-chemistry' allows arduous, time-consuming molecular processes to be vastly sped up effectively. Not smartless by a long shot.