“I was so shocked that I couldn’t breathe,” he told the news of the award.
Carolyn Bertoge (56), a professor at Stanford University in the United States, who was announced as a joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on the 5th (local time) wore the nickname “prima donna”.
According to the American scientific journal “Science”, after graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she was the only woman in the laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.
Since then, one in three women has been in the faculty of the Department of Chemistry.
In 2010 she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize, awarded to world-class inventors.
The Remelson-MIT website describes him as “the inventor of the world’s first bioorthogonal chemical reaction, a technique for visualizing biomolecules in living or animal cells.”
Previously, in 1999, the MacArthur Foundation received the “Genius Grant” awarded to 20 creative and promising scientists.
“I knew from a young age that I was a minority,” he said in an interview at the time.
“In a way, being an authoritative woman can have a bigger impact on men,” she said.
“I hope that being trained by women when they leave my lab to start their career will make men and women feel the same in the lab,” she said.
Professor Bertoji has also taken the lead in commercializing the technology, such as starting an organic business.
In 2008, when he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he founded 7 initiatives, starting with “Redwood Bioscience”.
From an early age he became interested in science, influenced by his father, who was a physics professor at MIT.
“At the time, I was naturally fascinated by science,” he said.
“I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but as time goes on it’s getting more and more realistic,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press after being selected as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Professor Bertoji was contacted around 2am the same day and said: “I was so shocked that I couldn’t breathe.”
As soon as he heard about the award, he called his father and said, “I have something to tell you, please turn down the TV.”
His father, a retired physicist, was still watching TV awake at the time, he said.
After confirming that there hadn’t been an accident, his father said, “You got an award, didn’t you?”
One of the three sisters said, “I was lucky to have parents who were supportive, almost evangelical, and got their daughters involved in science.”
Previously, the Nobel Committee selected three Nobel Prize winners in chemistry: Bertoji, Morten Meldahl and K. Barry Sharpless, who developed a synthesis technology that quickly and efficiently combines molecular units.
Professor Bertoji has developed a “bioorthogonal reaction” that can cause a clicking reaction without affecting the normal metabolism of cells in a living organism, “taking click chemistry to a new level,” the Nobel Committee said.
“It’s doing chemistry inside the patient to make sure the drug is moving in the right place and away from the wrong place,” Bertoge said.
/ yunhap news
