This year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to American chemist Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Danish chemist Morten Meldal and American chemist K. Barry Shäplis. Barry Sharpless), for their contributions to the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.
This should be the time of the year when I pay the most attention to the world's cutting-edge technology, and although these studies are seriously beyond my ability to comprehend, I still feel admiration and pride to see the smartest group of human beings push our understanding of the world forward by such a small step.
Of the three, my attention was all on the female winner, Caroline. You know, in the past 120 years of the Nobel Prize, only 60 of the 954 winners are women, and the ratio of men and women is still seriously imbalanced.
And her award must be a big encouragement for those women who are interested in or engaged in scientific research.
And when I flipped through her resume, many contrasting keywords such as a scholarly family, heavy metal musicians, the youngest "genius award" winner, and coming out at the age of 18 caught my eye, and I couldn't help but sigh, sister, what kind of shuangwen mistress is this!
What is it like to be a top student?
Caroline was born in Boston in 1966, her father is a physics professor at MIT, and her sister is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her father came from an Italian family. Her grandmother, a very cultured and progressive woman at the time, founded Italy's first nursery for working mothers to help mothers return to work.
Due to the social environment in Italy at that time, the grandmother's family fled to the United States in the early 19th century. Despite having nothing to start from scratch in the United States, my grandmother always encouraged all her children to study hard, so every one of her children went to college, including women.
This was not common among American immigrants at the time.
And Caroline's mother was born into an ordinary family. Affected by the Great Depression, even though she excelled in high school, her parents still thought it was a waste of money for girls to go to college, so she had to go out and work, and gave up the sport she was good at.
But she scraped together enough money from her job to attend the then-secretarial school. Because of his hard work, he was at the top of his class and got the opportunity to work at MIT, which was almost the best secretarial job at the time. It was also there that she met Caroline's father.
Since childhood, Caroline has been ignorant of her current life experience that girls must be educated in order to have more life choices besides marriage and children.
And Caroline's sister, who is a mathematics professor at UCLA, was, in Caroline's words, the kind of genius who would rather solve math puzzles at home than go out to play.
But she is not a complete nerd, she participates in orchestras in her spare time, and works as a lifeguard in the summer because she wants to be cool, living a rich and casual life.
With such a sister, Caroline has lived in her shadow since she was a child, because the two are one year apart. Teachers who have taught her sister will always ask her: "Oh this is Andrea's little sister, are you as smart as your sister?" ”
And Caroline always answered, No.
Of course, she didn't deny her cleverness, as she did in Versailles, she just felt that her cleverness was not as obvious as her sister's.
When the sisters were growing up, their father, a physicist, always brought back a lot of strange gadgets, such as computer terminals when computers were not yet popular, and Christmas gifts for children were optical sets where they could assemble their own cameras.
The father, who specializes in construction, also took his daughters to build things in the basement, and when Caroline was 7 years old, they lived together in the house they built.
Growing up in such an environment, Caroline was influenced by the scientific atmosphere from an early age.
But she feels that for girls entering the science field, it doesn't matter whether they were exposed to science as a child, what matters is that they can bravely do things that break the traditional thinking.
In her later scientific research, she has always practiced this idea, never setting limits for herself, and striving to challenge seemingly impossible tasks.
Playing football while playing in a band, both stylistic and sports research
Unlike our image of scientists as calm and serious, Caroline has a wide range of hobbies, and they are not just for fun. Maybe this is the style of the top students, no matter what you do, you must do it to the extreme.
In high school, she spent most of her time in music. He played keyboards in jazz bands and participated in three or four singing groups.
After entering Harvard, she wanted to study music at the beginning, but was severely rebuked by her parents on the grounds that she could not make a living.
The parents also gave the example of a cousin in the family: she majored in music at Harvard University (what kind of fairy family is this?). But had to retake a computer degree to work in a bank to survive. It seems that even if I came to Harvard, I couldn't find a job after studying music.
Although she didn't make music a major, at Harvard, Caroline and a few friends formed a heavy metal band called Bored of Education, which translates to "tired of school." She does keyboard player with backing vocals in it.
Such a hardcore rock band swept the whole school, was often invited to perform in various places, earned back the tuition fees by performance fees, and won the band battle of the Ivy League in 1986.
Guitarist Tom Morello moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Harvard to form Rage Against the Machine and scored The Matrix and Pacific Rim.
Caroline won the award this time, he also tweeted congratulations for the first time, and the comments couldn't help but sigh, and the strange linkage increased!
In an interview, Caroline said that when she was in graduate school at Berkeley, when she saw her former teammate's band release her first album, she would also feel a wave in her heart, "Did I miss such an opportunity?" ”
In addition to music, she is also quite good at playing soccer, and she joked in an interview that Harvard sent a scout to watch her play and recruited her into Harvard.
Let chemistry save the world!
Her parents' strict requirements for grades, coupled with her own intelligence and diligence, made Caroline not worry much about grades since she was a child.
She has been interested in biology since high school, so she naturally chose it as her college major.
In her sophomore year, she began taking organic chemistry, a hard bone that students are known to be difficult to chew, but was unexpectedly drawn to its visual intuitiveness. She felt that this difficulty course was the challenge for her, so she switched to organic chemistry.
In her third year of Ph.D. in Berkeley, California, her doctoral supervisor, Mark Bednerski, had colon cancer and could not continue her research. Now, she estimates that she will have to change the research group and re-launch the doctoral program.
But in her own words, Berkeley at that time was like the American West, a little lawless. They actually let several of their students finish their doctoral projects and spend their funds without a supervisor.
So they had to do experiments, manage the lab, submit papers, and even argue with the journal editor that the reviewers' suggestions were unreasonable.
Looking back, this experience gave her an early understanding of how to manage a research group and laid a good foundation for her future career development.
She advised Mark is also a god man, and after getting colon cancer, she was not satisfied with passive treatment, so she simply went to study a medical degree to study how to kill cancer cells.
He later became an assistant professor of radiology at Stanford University and eventually died at the age of 47 after 14 years of battling cancer. He became a doctoral supervisor at a young age, and he was also a genius who died young.
Caroline published six first-author articles during her Ph.D. studies, graduated successfully, applied for a postdoctoral fellowship, and has been on her way ever since.
In 1996, she became an assistant professor at Berkeley, an associate professor three years later, and a professor three years later. She was the youngest recipient of MacArthur's Genius Award and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Speaking of her award-winning bioorthogonal chemistry, it is also thanks to a spit from her postdoc. Postdocs complain that it is too difficult to figure out the dynamics of sugar molecules in living organisms.
At that time, there were imaging techniques for proteins and nucleic acids, but sugar molecules did not. So they spent years of research and decided to fluorescerate sugar molecules like proteins.
But the idea sounds simple, but it's harder to do — the challenge is not to fluoresce-label sugar molecules, but to label them without affecting the function of other molecules.
They tried a lot of different things to find this kind of way, and finally succeeded. Caroline named the study Bioorthogonal Chemistry, opening up a whole new field.
From her Ph.D. years, Caroline focused not only on science, but also on how to apply these scientific discoveries to life for the benefit of the world.
In her group, research interests tend to fall into categories: one to find innovative ways to continue developing bioorthogonal chemical reactions, and the other to focus on the application of these technologies.
Later, she joined the ChEM-H (Chemistry, Engineering, Medicine and Human Health) Institute at Stanford University to explore the possibility of applying these technologies to the biomedical field to treat human diseases.
In an interview with the Nobel Prize, she mentioned that some of her family and friends have incurable diseases, and as a scientist, she still wants to use her wisdom to make some contributions to human health with people with common interests.
"When the world is in crisis, let chemistry save everything," she says.
Girls Power Revolutionizes the scientific community!
In the process of studying and working, Caroline entered the hardcore scientific research field alone as a woman, and was not hindered.
In the late '80s, probably only 10 percent of chemistry students were women. As one of the few girls in the lab, Caroline and her family also try to support each other by hosting a monthly schoolgirl party.
There was no internet, so they put up posters on campus and were attacked by sexisters.
In a 2003 interview, Caroline mentioned that Professor Daniu's attitude can have a huge impact on a field. She admits that when she was an undergraduate, several very influential professors never hid their injustices towards women and always refused to allow women to join their groups.
One of them also won the Nobel Prize, and the amplification effect of his influence has made many juniors accustomed to the culture of excluding women. Their message to students is that women will never be good chemists — "that's why I don't accept them, and you shouldn't."
That attitude, she joked, would take a long time to change "because basically you have to wait until these people die."
While they are all great in science, their authority and influence have also done irreparable damage to women aspiring to become organic chemists. These women will never realize their creativity and their potential as organic chemists.
But now, Caroline is a Nobel laureate herself. Over the course of her career, she has educated and mentored hundreds of students, and each of them mentors hundreds, so her approach to nurturing spreads exponentially from generation to generation.
Therefore, she has always insisted on training students to believe that women are capable scientists, can play leadership roles in the field of science, can become excellent graduate students, etc., which she believes will make students more willing to let women join their teams and pass on the same beliefs.
So when two postdocs in her lab gave birth, she was genuinely happy to serve as role models for the young girls in the lab and to see that working women in the lab could balance the pressures of family and work.
Such a nice owner, what a rarity. In the popular saying now, it is because you have been in the rain for yourself, so you have to hold an umbrella for those who come after you.
In addition to women, Caroline has another minority identity, which is homosexuality. At the age of 18, she realized that her sexual orientation was not the same as others, and then came out publicly.
In those homophobic times, it took a lot of courage to do so. She was also not strong enough to ignore the eyes of those around her, so she ran to Berkeley, California, where she was a more liberal and inclusive student.
She has also been treated unfairly because of this status, such as in an interview she gave when she won the Mark Arthur Genius Award at the age of 30, mentioning the husbands of two other women but not her wife.
That's why she has always been committed to promoting equality in science, and in 2007 she received an award recognizing LGBTQ scientists.
After the Nobel Prize results were announced, the staff of the Nobel Prize Committee called her late at night to interview her as soon as possible. At the end of the conversation, the other person said, enjoy this last peace. When the official announcement is made, your life will be different.
Perhaps, Caroline's award, in addition to affecting her own life, will also inspire more women, as well as other minorities, to have the strength to break through tradition and the courage to be more authentic to themselves.
Let the world see how unimaginable the energy that women can burst out when they don't set limits.
Resources:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/carolyn-bertozzi/3008380.article
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/3xomins#tab=ohDescription
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/One-on-one-with-Carolyn-Bertozzi/100/i12
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-rockstar-chemist-and-her-cancer-attacking-lawn-mower/
https://m.weibo.cn/status/4821487431714343?sourceType=weixin&from=10CA095010&wm=20005_0002&featurecode=newtitle
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/aM4Su2NOJHJCENMWxaz4RA