The Scientist 15[24]:12, Dec. 10, 2001

NEWS John Scott Award Goes to Recent Nobelist Philadelphia chemist returns home for one more honor

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Courtesy of Scripps Research Institute

K. Barry Sharpless

Sharpless pegs the beginnings of his inquisitive nature that spirited his prize-winning research on the long summer days spent at the New Jersey shore fishing or seining for crabs. Be it snapping turtle, eel, or even coelacanth, Sharpless always hoped for a new and outlandish catch, and today he continues to look for new reactivity and conduct chemistry the way he used to fish.¹ His research on chirally-catalyzed oxidation reactions is no fish story, however.

Chiral molecules or enantiomers are mirror-image molecules having identical compositions but a three-dimensional structure as different as your right and left hands. Sorting such molecules or selectively producing one structure over another had proven a difficult challenge for pharmaceutical companies, but crucial to overcome considering the nature of such distinctions. Tuberculosis fighting ethambutol, for example, has a mirror image twin that causes blindness.

Working with such people as Bob Michaelson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and Tsutomu Katsuki at Stanford University in the 1980s, Sharpless developed catalysts to selectively produce only the desired molecules--asymmetrically oxidizing olefins through the use of a titanium catalyst.² "It was basically the discovery that everybody points to and everything after that seems to be of less import to the world, although we found much better things after that," Sharpless says, admitting some frustration at the time that awards have taken from his current research. With the creation of catalysts capable of propelling forward the manufacture of medicines including antibiotics, heart drugs, and a widely used treatment for Parkinson's disease, Sharpless cast his net once again to search for new reactivity.

"[We] succeeded at doing the thing that enzymes couldn't do--be promiscuous rather than selective in a sense--because we can use our catalysts to make asymmetric anything. I realized I had to come back to mother in the end--mother being the enzyme." Sharpless' research still follows a medicinal bent. He and his colleagues are attempting to create enzyme inhibitors by working backward from the enzyme. "We're trying to piggyback on her tricks ... let the enzyme decide which Trojan horse needs to be built in the middle of it's living room," he says.

The John Scott Award was established and first bestowed in 1822 on a $4,000 trust fund left by an Edinburgh druggist known neither for scientific achievements nor for philanthropy. The prize, originally $20 and a copper medal, has been shared by such scientists as Marie Curie, Orville Wright, and Jonas E. Salk following the mandate in Scott's will that the prize is given "to men or women who make useful inventions," though the prize clearly shifted focus toward basic scientific research over time,³ its mission matches well Sharpless' beliefs that research must be propelled toward the useful, a result he says of his utilitarian Quaker upbringing.

Also accepting the John Scott award was Vera Cooper Rubin, an observational astronomer at Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Rubin was recognized for her contributions establishing the prevalence of dark matter in the Universe.

The Scientist 15[24]:12, Dec. 10, 2001