The story so far: A trio of chemists, Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless, are this year’s Nobel laureates for Chemistry. They won it for pioneering ‘click chemistry’, which underpins green chemistry.
What is click chemistry?
A big part of what chemists do is making new molecules, which is as much an art as it is science. The standard approach is to mimic nature. In the early 20th century, finding nitrogen in a form usable by plants, despite it being the most abundant element in the atmosphere, was one of the discoveries scientists were striving hard to achieve. German chemist, Fritz Haber cracked the code for ammonia, which combined nitrogen and hydrogen that plants could synthesise for nitrogen, and Carl Bosch figured out a way to produce it in massive amounts. The Haber-Bosch process is still the dominant way of producing cheap fertilizer and is at the heart of industrialised agriculture. However, this process is extremely energy intensive and polluting and the modern-day challenge is to therefore produce so-called ‘green ammonia’. This principle extends to most synthetic chemicals — where scientists try to create a natural substance, in a way that is different from the usual method which is often circuitous and creates several unwanted toxic by-products.
