I had no idea people would have to pronounce this when I coined it—it’s a mouthful!” says Carolyn Bertozzi of the term she invented to describe the scientific breakthrough that won her the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless). “Bioorthogonal” chemistry refers to methods of performing chemical reactions inside living cells, animals, or people—rather than in beakers, flasks, and test tubes. “In the 1990s,” she explains, “we had all these ideas for ways you could study biology and make new kinds of medicines if you could design reactions where the chemicals totally ignore the biological system, but when they see each other, boom, they react. ‘Orthogonal’ means ‘no interaction,’ so ‘bioorthogonal’ means ‘no interaction with biology.’”
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