Interview with the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry Morten Meldal on 6 December 2022 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

What do you enjoy about science? 

Morten Meldal: I love to do things practically. I’m actually in the lab with my coworkers quite a lot. We’re doing exciting projects in the fume hood. My philosophy is that you cannot make any new discoveries behind the office desk. You make them in a fume hood. You make them by observing, of course, having good ideas and trying them out, and seeing where it goes. Then follow the trails that are most promising in your research. 

Where does your passion for science come from? 

Morten Meldal: I should acknowledge my parents very much. As a young boy they took us around in the Scandinavian woods, in Sweden and in Denmark. We were collecting everything from butterflies to flowers, to rocks; everything that you could possibly collect. We made collections from that, and we made displays of it. So that was my first inspiration. Also, I was very lucky, because my grandparents have a farm in Bornholm where I was shipped off to every single opportunity they had. I was there and I was out in the morning at eight and in at nine o’clock in the evening. I had a whole day of nature and you know, being in the fields, in the forest, on the beaches, was really nice as a child. 

One of the things I remember very clearly is, I was lying in my grandfather’s barley field. You have this roof of the barley on top, and then you have a microscopic world underneath with puppy flowers and all sorts of wheat, but also a lot of insects. There were these big green grasshoppers, and I remember clearly that I was already then thinking about, how does this evolve? Where does it come from? So that was my sort of my first kind of inspiration for thinking about nature and chemistry. 

How did it feel to get the Nobel Prize call? 

Morten Meldal: When I received the message from Stockholm on the Nobel Prize, I was really cool. First, I thought it’s probably a prank played by my students, because I’ve tried that before. But I could very quickly hear that this was not a prank and this was serious. I talked with three committee members, and they told me about it, and it was very, very exciting. Then I had to wait for an hour. That was kind of tough to wait for an hour, not telling anyone; even my wife I couldn’t call. After that, I heard the announcement, and as soon as I opened my office door, there were like 50 people in the corridor outside, all cheering. That was a very pleasant experience. 

What happened after the call? 

Morten Meldal: We had a lot of congratulations and cheering and so on. Then there was a press conference, and after that, in a period of two hours, the head of department arranged a big get together in our big hall, and that was really a good experience. There were like 300 people or so all cheering over this, because in Denmark, it’s not such a usual thing to get a Nobel Prize. It’s actually 25 years since we last got a Nobel Prize, and it wasn’t even at Copenhagen University. So they really thought this was a perfect opportunity to celebrate. 

In Denmark, your prize has been very celebrated. Some are comparing you to a rock star. How has that been? 

Morten Meldal: I wouldn’t say a rock star, but a science star? I actually go to young people to inspire them. We have something called the Science Club in Denmark, and they engage with fourth and fifth grade students to try to inspire them to get into science. I think that’s a very good initiative, and I think we should actually expand dramatically on that. 

Young people have the ability to store images much better than we have as grownups. If you remember back and reflect on your childhood, you’ll see it as images. I think we should take an opportunity there and try to use our modern capacity of doing animations and so on, and make the young people understand. Not by rules and not by calculations of quantitative measures, but rather by visualisation of the chemistry universe. 

We cannot see the chemistry with our eyes. It’s so small. So if we can animate it and make it the property of these young people, maybe they’ll get a completely different kind of interest in science. Since chemistry is everything, as I say, I think it’s important that they learn about it, not only for doing new inventions, but also for general public opinion and for making the right political decisions and so on. 

What advice would you give to a student or young researcher? 

Morten Meldal: I usually tend to say that ambition of becoming something is not the right driver. If you are interested in science, it should be the science itself that drives you. You should be interested in the actual problem that you are handling. That should be what really excites you. The only way that can excite you is by you knowing about some of the parts that are happening, and you’re curious about the things you don’t know. 

How important is sustainability for you? 

Morten Meldal: Sustainability, in my opinion, for all of us is our future. There is no future without sustainability. I think chemistry can offer an important impact on sustainability. I think everything has a certain amount of chemistry content in them. So, for example, our windmills are made with wings that are glass fiber, and glass fiber is not the healthiest. Once it starts to wither away, we will have all these fibers everywhere. That’s not nice. If we can make new materials, if we can make something that is cheap to make and that we can put on the roofs of buildings and that everybody can afford. If we can make concretes that are not water compatible, so they won’t be wet inside and degrade? There’s a lot of things chemistry can do for us. 

What are the key implications of your research? 

Morten Meldal: Click chemistry is a chemistry all by itself. It’s green, so it’s completely an atom economy. There’s no waste. All the parts that go into the reaction also exist in the product. It can be carried out in water because of this copper catalysis. The copper acts like a template for gathering the reactant. You can do it at very, very low concentrations and still get quantitative reactions, because of the big difference in energy between the starting materials and the products. So it doesn’t go back, that’s what characterises it. It can be carried out anywhere, anytime, selectively, even inside cells. 

The copper catalysed click chemistry is used everywhere. It’s sort of a crown jewel, because it’s used in material sciences, it’s used in surface modifications, is used in all sorts of medicinal chemistry today. So I think that it has changed what we can do. Not only has it made things more easy to do, but simply hanged conceptually, what can we do. We can take functions that are separate functions in molecules and put them together into one molecule. We get a molecular robot, essentially. 

How do you cope with failure? 

Morten Meldal: I’m very fortunate to have an ability to forget about failures. I just go on. I usually have several things going on at the same time and just go with the things that seems to show success. That’s probably my way out of that, I guess. 

What qualities do you need to be a successful scientist? 

Morten Meldal: Of course you need a lot of will, you need a lot of endurance in what you want to do and why you want to do it. You need to be able to think. That’s, of course, clear, but it’s also that you pursue goals that are associated directly with what you want to solve, what kind of problem you wanna deal with. I usually dream a lot about the things I do, I dream about them at night or before I fall asleep. I think through all these issues and problems. 

If you leave your job at four and go home and forget everything until you meet next day at nine, that’s not how you become a good scientist. That’s one thing. The other thing is if you have ambition driving you. I mean, if it’s not the actual problem that is driving your curiosity, but more I have to do this because I want to achieve to become this professor or write this paper in science or become a Nobel laureate, in the end, that’s not going to take you anywhere, in my opinion. It’s a curiosity and the engagement in the problem that makes a good scientist. 

How important has collaboration been to your success? 

Morten Meldal: In science in general, collaboration is very important because none of us can know everything that you need to know today to do great science. But I would also say that the idea doesn’t come as a collective group. The idea that leads to something very new can happen at a bus stop, or as I said, before you fall asleep at night. It’s not something that is made by will. It’s made because it just happens in your mind, and only one person can have that mind going for them. Even if it’s a collaboration that ends up being a collaboration, it starts out somewhere. 

How can we encourage more diversity in science? 

Morten Meldal: I’m a little bit against quotas, but that is because I think that curiosity is a driver. I think that it’s really about everybody as a person in science, and everybody has that opportunity today.  We should definitely encourage our young, and I’m sure I can see that already now in the universities, that if we talk gender equality, I think that that is coming up almost by itself because the boys cannot follow the girls any longer. They are just going ahead like that, in our university at least. And then you have also equality across different cultures. I think that’s important. We should try, in particular in small country like Denmark, to invite the best brains from abroad to come and study and get their education in Denmark, maybe stay if they want to, and help developing our technologies in the local area. I think that could be the same everywhere. 

How important is music in your life? 

Morten Meldal: It’s always been important. I have with me here a guest, Henrik Schütze, who is a fantastic artist. He is a painter, and he’s also playing music. I played music with him for many years. And I started playing samba with a samba band, in around the same time as the click invention. We were in Brazil and we played in the area of Salvador de Bahia. We were actually making our life by traveling around with bus and playing for local communities, and we got shelter and food and we traveled for the next part and so on. That was a really, really big experience for me, a great experience and very good friends. Recently I gave a lecture at the Royal Danish Society of Science and Letters, and they had actually invited this band for a fantastic celebration. It was very good to see them again, because I haven’t played with them for the last 18 years since I got my son. And I play in a rock band. On Mondays we usually practice. We’re not going out playing very much, but we like very much to play cover music. 

Do you think music has been important to your scientific career as well? 

Morten Meldal: I think that music is a very good way to train you the associative thoughts in your mind, particularly if you’re improvising. I usually put on some African music and play guitar with it. You very quickly have to modulate your mind in this when you’re doing improvisations. That’s the same with science. You should be able to quickly make the associations between different understandings, different subjects, different technologies and so on. 

What environments help with creativity? 

Morten Meldal: I think we should get rid of the way that we are actually funding today. You sit behind your desk and you invent what you should do the next five years, and you send in your application. Then half a year, a year later, you’re actually getting the money. Now it’s six years of planning ahead. I think that’s completely wrong because you should be able to, without notice, change the track of your research to follow the most exciting things that you observe in the lab. This is really my idea about what is wrong with the current way of funding research. 

If we could fund instead based on what you have achieved the last three years for example, in terms of peer reviewed publications, maybe even teaching, and then allow the researcher to decide what is important and what is not important. The people who are in the evaluation panels, I deeply respect the efforts they’re doing, but honestly, I don’t think they can be experts in all the things that they actually evaluate. I often see funding where I cannot help thinking, why is that? Why was that funded and not something else? 

Can you tell us about the object that you are donating to the Nobel Prize Museum?  

Morten Meldal: The object is a Teflon block. This is the first multiple column peptide synthesiser in the world. I guess it was made in 1987 in the garage of my neighbor. He had a workshop and I could drill the holes and do everything and put it together, so that I did. It can be used for synthesis of 20 different peptides. But we also used it for some of the first combinatorial synthesis. With it, we have a paper that describes its use for combinatorial synthesis of millions of compounds. We improved it dramatically, so with the modern version of this machine we can, in one week, synthesise two million compounds. 

This is actually what led up to the click chemistry, because in the nineties we were all looking for quantitative chemical transformations. In order to do these millions of compounds, we need clean reactions, and click reactions is essentially a clean reaction that only happens like that. We were looking for it, and we were very lucky to find it.  

So this is actually what I see. If you have a problem, go for it. Don’t think that this is for the workshop, or this is for a physicist, or this is for somebody with optics. Go for it yourself. That is my advice to the young people who want to do research. 

Watch the interview