“We have only just scratched the surface”

As a  young boy, Morten Meldal was always fascinated by nature. He would often travel to his grandparent’s farm in the Danish countryside, or his family home in Sweden, surrounded by the forests, nature, and the complexity of natural life, whether it was picking mushrooms or collecting butterflies. As a teenager, he built rockets and firecrackers, before going to a technical university with a primary interest in programming and computing, and making his own programmes. These interests eventually led to him deciding to pursue a career in chemistry.

“So if I wanted to know more about the world, I should choose chemistry.”

“I chose chemistry because I thought, philosophically, chemistry describes everything around us. So if I wanted to know more about the world, I should choose chemistry,” he said, somewhat modestly, for someone just awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Morten Meldal is currently a professor at the University of Copenhagen and Head of the Center of Evolutionary Chemical Biology, and was awarded the Nobel Prize 2022 “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry” together with Barry Sharpless and Carolyn Bertozzi.

A groundbreaking discovery

According to Morten Meldal, what makes it such a groundbreaking discovery is “the fact that we can do things we have never been able to do before,” he said. “And also the fact that we can make these multifunctional molecules.”

In the most basic sense, click chemistry allows molecules to snap together like Lego blocks. This simplicity fits well with Meldal’s interest in the subject, and his infectious enthusiasm for it. He is also effusive in his praise of both Sharpless and Bertozzi. Meldal and Sharpless independently discovered what has become “the crown jewel of click chemistry: the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition”. Bertozzi took the idea further and developed reactions that could be used inside living cells.

“I haven’t worked together with them, but I have visited Barry a couple of times and I know Carolyn all the way back from when she was just finished as a PhD. I have followed her work and she has really done some incredibly exciting work,” said Meldal.

It’s all about the science

Denmark also seems the right sort of place for anyone with an interest in chemistry. “There is a lot of important research going on in Denmark. We have the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and Aarhus University,” said Meldal.

This helps to foster friendly competition, and according to Meldal that has always been characteristic of Scandinavian research because “we aren’t trying to fight other groups. There is so much to discover, so why should we fight about it?”.

“It’s all about the science. So you cannot help thinking about the next problem, the next solution, the intriguing questions, philosophical questions about our being, about the universe and so on. I love these philosophical issues.”

This comes across very clearly that there is so much to learn and discover, that Meldal says it can sometimes feel as though you never get a moment to yourself. “It’s all about the science. So you cannot help thinking about the next problem, the next solution, the intriguing questions, philosophical questions about our being, about the universe and so on. I love these philosophical issues,” he said.

Medal’s respect for those in his field extends not just to his colleagues and peers. At the Nobel ceremony, one of his invited guests was his mentor who supervised his PhD thesis at the Technical University of Denmark in the 1980s, Klaus Bock. Christian Tornøe, who was doing his PhD under Meldal when he made his click chemistry discovery was also invited.

If you don’t talk enough you will perish

For all the positives that come with the Nobel Prize, both personally and for the field in general, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges outside of the science that can be daunting. Finding the time between “the best possible teaching and the best possible research [is a challenge] because you want to always do too much,” said Meldal. Funding applications also take up a lot of valuable time.

The way Meldal sees it, in the 1970s there was perhaps a lack of responsibility amongst scientists, and so control was placed in the hands of institutions and funding agencies. He believes nowadays scientists are much more responsible and are much better at evaluating applications and results.

“The best way would be to use our peer review process where we have the evaluation of our work,” he said.

This would be based on the amount of output scientists publish, “We just have to accept as scientists that if you don’t talk enough you will perish, and as a scientist you have to accept that and take responsibility. If this is the case you can follow your intuition and the next exciting thing you observe in the lab. You can follow that and you can make more exciting new discoveries than the ones I have made,” said Meldal.

Chemistry is still young

But this doesn’t put a dampener on his advice to budding scientists. In fact, when asked what he would say to young scientists today he said “Study Chemistry!” and laughs. “Chemistry is actually very exciting, and we have only just scratched the surface.”

“I think chemistry as a fundamental science is still young. We can still get a lot of new understanding out of it. There is a lot to do still.”

Meldal believes that every three or four years there is a breakthrough in chemistry that creates entirely new fields in science. “I think chemistry as a fundamental science is still young. We can still get a lot of new understanding out of it. There is a lot to do still,” concluded Morten Meldal.