“I was so shocked that I mightn’t breathe,” he said at the news of the award.
Carolyn Bertoge (56), a professor at Stanford University in the United States, who was announced as the joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on the 5th (local time) wore the nickname ‘first woman’.
According to the American science journal ‘Science’, following graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she was the only woman in the laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.
Since then, it has been one in three women on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry.
In 2010, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize, awarded to world-class inventors.
The Remelson-MIT website describes him as “inventing the world’s first bioorthogonal chemical reaction, a technique for displaying biomolecules in living cells or animals.”
Earlier, 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 some ways, being a woman of authority can have a greater impact on men,” she said.
“I hope that being trained by women when they leave my lab to start their careers will make men and women feel equal in the lab,” he said.
Professor Bertoji also took the lead in commercializing the technology, such as starting a bio venture.
In 2008, when he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he founded 7 ventures, starting with ‘Redwood Bioscience’.
From an early age, he was interested in science, influenced by his father, who was a professor of physics at MIT.
“At the time, I was naturally fascinated by science,” he said.
“I’m not entirely sure if this is true, but it’s becoming more and more realistic as time goes on,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press following being selected as the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Professor Bertoji was contacted around 2 am on the same day and said, “I was so shocked that I mightn’t breathe.”
As soon as he heard regarding 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 at the time in a waking style, he said.
After confirming that there was no accident, his father said, “You won the award, right?”
One of three sisters, she said, “I was lucky to have parents who were supportive, almost evangelical, and involved their daughters 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.
According to the Nobel Committee, Professor Bertoji has developed a ‘bioorthogonal reaction’ that can cause a click 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 that the drug is moving to the right place and away from the wrong place,” Bertoge said.
/yunhap news
