Sharpless was born on 28 April 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, although when asked he usually says he is from the New Jersey Shore, as it is where he spent most of his summers and weekends as a child. His mother’s parents had set up a fishery there after emigrating from Norway; his father was a doctor, running a one-man surgery in Philadelphia. He went to Quaker-run schools, which he enjoyed, but science was not his passion. Instead, he devoted his time to fishing, and by the age of ten he ran crab and eel traps and supplied fish to friends of the family. At fourteen, he started working on a charter boat, and continued to do this each summer until he began his graduate degree.

In 1959, he went to Dartmouth College as a pre-medical student, mainly he says because his parents hoped that he would follow his father’s career. He enjoyed literature courses most, but he was required to major in biology or chemistry, and opted to go for the latter. The chemistry graduate programme at Dartmouth was small, and professors were constantly in search of people to help them in their laboratories, which meant that there were opportunities for undergraduates to be involved in research projects normally reserved for graduate students.

As a result of this unusual opportunity, Sharpless chose to study for a doctorate in organic chemistry at Stanford University instead of going to medical school. It was there that he truly found a passion for chemistry, in particular the Periodic Table, to the extent that he has hardly gone fishing at all since his first year at Stanford. It was also at Stanford that Sharpless met his future wife, Jan Dueser, who was his roommate’s date at a beach party when they were first introduced. A year and a half later they were married, on 28 April 1965, his 24th birthday, and they have three children. Sharpless completed his doctorate in 1968, followed by postdoctoral work at Stanford and Harvard University before he accepted a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1970.

Sharpless moved back to Stanford in 1977, and in 1980 he reported a breakthrough in creating a chiral catalyst that steers a broad family of chemical reactions known as oxidations. These are extremely important reactions for chemists as their products serve as the platform for creating a wide range of materials and drugs — one important product created through this process is the active ingredient in the heart medication called beta blockers. Moving back to MIT shortly after, Sharpless developed and refined this process into a routine method, making it an essential tool in organic laboratories worldwide.

In 1990, he moved to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where he remains today. Among his main research focuses is the area of click chemistry, which aims to synthesize chemicals in the way that nature does by joining small units of chemicals together, rather than constructing them molecule by molecule.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001
Barry Sharpless’ Nobel Lecture
The Sharpless Lab at Scripps University
Wikipedia: Barry Sharpless