From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Barry Sharpless (born 28 April 1941) is an American chemist known for his work on stereoselective reactions.

Biography

Early years

Sharpless was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Friends' Central School in 1959. He continued his studies at Dartmouth College (1963) and earned his Ph.D from Stanford University in 1968. He continued post-doctoral work at Stanford University and Harvard University. He holds honorary degree of Technical University of Munich.

Research

Sharpless has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. He currently holds the W. M. Keck professorship in chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute.

In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on stereoselective oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, Sharpless oxyamination). This prize was shared with William S. Knowles and Ryoji Noyori (for their work on stereoselective hydrogenation). He also successfully epoxidized (using racemic tartaric acid) a C-86 Buckminster Fullerene ball, employing p-Cresol as solvent. Currently he spends much of his time promoting click chemistry, a set of highly selective, exothermic reactions which occur under mild conditions; the most successful variant of which is the azide alkyne Huisgen cycloaddition to form 1,2,3-triazoles.

Personal life

Sharpless married Jan Dueser on 28 April 1965. They have three children; Hannah (b. 1976), William (b. 1978), and Isaac (b. 1980)

External links

• K. Barry Sharpless at The Scripps Research Institute
• Sharpless Nobel Prize lecture

References

• "K. Barry Sharpless". The Notable Names Database. 2008. http://www.nndb.com/people/854/000100554/. Retrieved 2008-10-18.  

From Wikiquote

K. Barry Sharpless (born 26 April 1941) is an American chemist renowned for his work on organometallic chemistry. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001.

Sourced

• We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.
  • Nobel Banquet speech, 2001

• ...when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001

• Chemists usually write about their chemical careers in terms of the different areas and the discrete projects in those areas on which they have worked. Essentially all my chemical investigations, however, are in only one area, and I tend to view my research not with respect to projects, but with respect to where I’ve been driven by two passions which I acquired in graduate school: I am passionate about the Periodic Table (and selenium, titanium and osmium are absolutely thrilling), and I am passionate about catalysis. What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist; new catalytic reactivity is, of course, my personal coelacanth.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001

• The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.
  • Nobel lecture, 2001

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

K. Barry Sharpless