Interview with the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry K. Barry Sharpless on 6 December 2022 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How does it feel to be back in Stockholm to receive your second Nobel Prize? 

K. Barry Sharpless: I’m not great in social circumstances, so I feel uncomfortable when I’m under the limelight. I worry a lot about that, but I’ve done it so often. I wish I had more ability to speak clearly what I’m thinking, because I have to creep up on it often. I’m not very clear to other people, but that’s my biggest problem. People, especially when you get better known, tend to think, “oh, I’ve got to figure this out, because he’s obviously very articulate and I’m not understanding him”.  

My motivation is curiosity. I started that way as a kid and the motivation was the ocean in New Jersey where I grew up. There’s so many creatures, and I just spent most of my time in the summer by myself pretty much just digging and catching and finding and searching. I was trying to find everything that was known down there, and I wasn’t catching them just to catch fish or something. I was looking for something weird. I always wanted to find something new and different. 

Do you think you were born with that curiosity? 

K. Barry Sharpless: My father was a hardworking, let’s say workaholic, surgeon in Philadelphia. My mom was a very lovely person and she had friends down in New Jersey where she grew up. My sister and my mom and I, we would go to New Jersey anytime we could. That was where we were happy. If your mother’s happy, I think you’re happy too. That’s something that occurred to me later in life. When mother ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. We just loved it. We escaped whenever we could. I got a good education at Quaker School in Philadelphia, but I’m not sure the things you learn in school really are absolutely essential to finding things in the natural world. I think my experience from say, four years old up till when I left around 17, 18, to go to Stanford, were the formative years for me being curious about the natural world.  

How did you celebrate the accomplishment of receiving two prizes? 

K. Barry Sharpless: To me, they just happen because I’m bit of a nut about doing what I do. I don’t think they happen because of any other reason. Celebrating is hard. 

I used to have more of these hobbies and things, but now I feel pretty invested in this underworld that nobody sees, that I think needs to be sort of excavated still, and I try to do it the best I can. I should quit. I should retire. My wife sure wishes I would. But I don’t know what I would do if I retired. You know, some people just become a pain in the neck after they retire.  

What do you think is the secret to success? 

K. Barry Sharpless: It’s being able to see what’s important. Not always, but most of the time if you have the kind of curiosity that’s this dispersed curiosity, you can actually see things in other fields that apparently they don’t see themselves. The main thing is: how do you tell whether your idea’s worth anything? If it’s right or wrong? That’s the hardest part for anybody. My way to do that was I try to kill it right away. If I have an idea that looks important, I try to get ideas where I can do a night or two’s worth of work in the lab and show that it was baloney, you know, just kill it. 

I see something that implies that these several things, will do something that take them over this mountain and they’ll show up over there. Maybe there’s no way to get there, but I can test it quickly ometimes. I can say, does it or doesn’t it do that? If it doesn’t, it’s dead and I forget about it. But if it comes back to me again a month or a couple months later, and the same thing is happening, I say, maybe I didn’t get the answer to that. Subconsciously it’s actually moving me around over the chemical terrain. I say, why did you come back to me? Two years ago I thought of that. Why are you back there now knocking at my door? And I say, maybe you deserve another chance. Some of the recent things we did were like that. 

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

K. Barry Sharpless: Be sure to be interested. If you’re interested in something, you can go many, many miles beyond exhaustion in trying to understand. If you’re interested, you care. If you think you have to learn something, chances are you may have a lucky idea while you’re doing it. Usually, you have an idea while you’re stretching. Also learning and reading outside your own field. The worst thing we have in these disciplines, really don’t exist in the real world. They only exist because of human mind imposed them and the history of education. 

Your former professor Spencer, taught you to think like a molecule. Can you explain what that means? 

K. Barry Sharpless: I worry about what’s going to go wrong. So when I think like a molecule, what I’m doing is being neurotic. I’m worried everything’s going to go wrong that I can possibly imagine, even more than I can imagine. By doing that, when I run the reaction, I’ve gotten over 90% of the failures before I even start. Most people just take the failures, roll over them continuously and they give up. That’s what happens, I think, by thinking like a molecule. It’s not something that you’re proud of, but it’s a way to worry about the environment that you’re swimming through if you’re a molecule. 

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

K. Barry Sharpless: Up in the Andes, in the Antofagasta, in Chile copper mine, they’re making copper on a megaton scale down there – it’s a beautiful blue copper sulfate and you reduce it onto big sheets by electricity, and it makes beautiful copper metal. That’s how copper is made. In modern times they take copper and make it into balls. They just let it cool in a ball and the ball weighs about, I don’t know how many pounds, but it’s about seven moles. 

We take these copper balls and throw them into the anode, and they play onto the cathode. That’s what they’re for. I said, these would be great to have around just for fun. So I got 200 pound boxes of them and put them in flower pots, gently because they would crack. AndI would just give them to people on a whim, because the copper reaction became so famous, it became a symbol.  

Lots of people around the world have them as copper paper weights, but they could use them for defense if they got attacked in their office. I thought of them as good for breaking the plate glass so I could jump out of the second story window. But they’re a symbol of copper’s majesty. I’ll tell you a poem that maybe many people don’t know, and I love this poem. It’s Rudyard Kipling. “Gold is for the mistress – silver for the maid. Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade! Good! said the Baron, sitting in his hall, but iron – cold iron – is master of them all.” 

Watch the interview