site.btaInterview with Scientist Morten Meldal, 2022 Nobel Laureate for Development of Click Chemistry and Bioorthogonal Chemistry

Scientist Morten Meldal, 2022 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, said in a BTA interview, that everything in nature is chemistry, chemistry is beautiful. 

Meldal was among nearly 40 Nobel laureates who discussed their careers in science, the future of research and gave advice to young scientists over six days in Lindau, Germany. The 72nd edition of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings was held from June 25 to June 30.

In 2022, the Nobel Committee awarded Morten Meldal from Denmark and Carolyn Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless from the USA with the most prestigious scientific award in chemistry, the Nobel Prize, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry".

Meldal was born in 1954 in Copenhagen. He graduated in chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, where he defended his doctorate. From 1988 to 2011, he worked at the Carlsberg Laboratory, and then he was a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. His research is in the field of bioorganic chemistry and he is among the pioneers of click chemistry.

In his interview with BTA, Meldal spoke about his  discovery which won him the Nobel Prize and its practical applications. The Danish researcher participated in the meeting for the first time as a Nobel laureate, but had participated in the forum decades ago as a young scientist. Young researchers have a chance to participate in the forum only once after a careful selection process, there are no restrictions for Nobel laureates. Meldal was among the first Nobel laureates to present their lecture at the Lindau meeting.

In your lecture you said that chemistry is everything, and you think that chemistry should be thought from the first year at school. 

Absolutely.

So, if you have to do this, if you have to go to a school and teach five or six year-olds, how would you teach chemistry. and how would you explain your click chemistry? 

So, you have a way of remembering things. This can be when you have a conversation with yourself in your mind, saying words and sentences that remind you of what you have seen, or you can have pictures. A lot of people have this ability to imagine in their head experiences that they've had before. So that's a way of storage of memory. And I think children are actually extremely good at that. So children learn languages in whole sentences. They don't know anything about grammar, or anything like that. 

They see the language, and we see images around us. It's a very chaotic world to arrive to when you are a child, and still you get a complete knowledge of it within a very short period of time, actually. 

And children are very good at storing images. So that's my idea - that you can actually sit and watch for 5 minutes how water behaves. So we are actually using our ability to animate, to go into the molecules, looking at how the atoms are behaving, how they are composed, how they bind to each other, how they interact, how they move. All of these things are actually the framework that you need in order to understand chemistry later on. So if we do that with kids, they will have this framework present somewhere in their brain when they grow up and have to understand kinetics and all of the things that we use in chemistry every day. 

And what about click chemistry? How would you explain it? 

The way I explain it to kids in Denmark – I have made cartoon figures,  Pac-Man figures. 

Oh, you do it already? 

Yes. I have very strong magnets that you can get from a hard disk in computers. These are of course kept at a distance. So I ask one of the kids to take one of the Pac-Mans and I have the other Pac-Man and we go around and suddenly they click like that in the room and everybody goes: “Yes!”. That's click chemistry. 

So you can click things together, like molecular glue, like a glue that can link your molecules together, without disturbing the rest of the molecule. The small parts that do the click chemistry are very selective in doing just that. 

And this is the essence of your discovery?

Yes. So, essentially, we discovered another kind of chemistry which can be performed orthogonally. That means without disturbing all the known chemistry, we can do our chemistry and all known chemistry doesn't influence our chemistry. So it's like a parallel universe of chemistry, that we are discovering. 

There is some suspicion in society about chemistry. People are not very much in love with chemistry. 

Yes, but there's no good or bad chemistry. Chemistry is literally everything. So if you're tired, some kind of compound goes to a receptor - it's chemistry. If you're hungry, there are some hormones that allow you to feel that you are hungry. If you’re in pain there is a pain molecule that makes you feel the pain, so that you would be careful not to do that again. 

And scientists are more like artists, you know?  If you have this three-dimensional world, that chemists are proud of having, that three-dimensional world is almost like painting a 3-dimensional painting as a painter, you use that to imagine how molecules can fit together, what happens, what are the movements that we can expect and so on. 

What is the application of click chemistry in everyday life? 

I wouldn't say there's one application. There are many, many, many applications, because suddenly a whole new range of things are possible. Because we can glue together functions in biology, for example, we can take this function and that function and that function and glue them all together to make a small robot that has wheels, that has a mouth, that can chew, that can transport itself somewhere. We can actually make small molecules that function just like robots. 

There are perfect applications out there. But generally, I think the most important thing is that it's broadly applicable in medicinal chemistry, in nanochemistry, any kind of food chemistry, to pack and wrap things. And the good thing about click chemistry is that it's green chemistry. If you want to separate good and bad, click chemistry is on the “good” side, because it's something that we can carry out in water at very low concentration quantitatively without any waste.

Would you share about your current work? 

I cannot tell you any details because I don't do that in principle before I publish. But I can tell you that I'm very interested in chemical transformations. And so, we're working with chemical transformations which we tried to simulate like natural enzymes with completely different compounds in order to make a new sandbox to play with, initially. This could be a very useful sandbox, we can do new type of reactions we have never seen before.