Karl Barry Sharpless

Karl Barry Sharpless (born 26 April 1941) is an American stereochemist. He is a two-time Nobel laureate in Chemistry known for his work on stereoselective reactions and click chemistry.

Karl Barry Sharpless

Sharpless was awarded half of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions", and one third of the 2022 prize, jointly with Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Morten P. Meldal, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry". Sharpless is the fifth person (in addition to two organizations) to have twice been awarded a Nobel prize, along with Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger, and the third to have been awarded two prizes in the same discipline (after Bardeen and Sanger).

Quotes

• We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.
  • Nobel Banquet speech, 2001

• ...when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001

• Chemists usually write about their chemical careers in terms of the different areas and the discrete projects in those areas on which they have worked. Essentially all my chemical investigations, however, are in only one area, and I tend to view my research not with respect to projects, but with respect to where I’ve been driven by two passions which I acquired in graduate school: I am passionate about the Periodic Table (and selenium, titanium and osmium are absolutely thrilling), and I am passionate about catalysis. What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist; new catalytic reactivity is, of course, my personal coelacanth.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001

• The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001