Sharpless, K Barry (1941– )

US chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001, shared with US chemist William S Knowles and Japanese chemist Ryoji Noyori, for his role in the development of chiral catalysts (see chirality) for oxidation reactions.

Sharpless built on the earlier work of Knowles and developed a set of catalysts that could produce the preferred chiral form of the products of oxidation reactions. These reactions produce molecules with an increased number of functional groups and so are useful in the synthesis of complex molecules, such as drugs. Chiral catalysts for oxidation reactions are particularly important in the industrial-scale synthesis of antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, and heart drugs such as beta-blockers.

Sharpless was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Stanford University, California, in 1968. He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1970 to 1977 before returning to Stanford. Sharpless rejoined MIT in 1980 and was the Arthur C Cope Professor of Chemistry there from 1987 to 1990. He was appointed the W M Keck Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California in 1990 and became a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in 1996. Sharpless became an honorary fellow of the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry in 1998 and was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000.