Barry Sharpless’s office at Scripps feels less like a workplace and more like a mind turned inside out. Papers lean in uneven stacks. Books crowd the shelves. Molecular models perch on the desk like small constellations paused mid spin. A globe sits near a scatter of journals. Art hangs between equations. Nothing feels curated for effect. Everything feels accumulated through decades of thinking.
When I walked in, Barry did not begin with chemistry. He reached up and carefully lifted an old framed photograph from the wall. It was a portrait of his daughter standing in front of a chalkboard thick with chemical equations. His wife, Janice, had wanted him to show it to me. He handed it over with a quiet smile. Years ago, after the photo was taken, his daughter looked at the formulas behind her and asked her father if that was where he had been spending his time. The question carries both innocence and truth. It lingers.
Barry is nothing like the caricature of a two time Nobel laureate. He won his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for his work on chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions, methods that allow chemists to create molecules in one precise handed form rather than its mirror image. That control of chirality is not an aesthetic concern. In biology, left and right matter. One mirror image of a molecule can heal. The other can harm. His second Nobel Prize in Chemistry came in 2022 for the development of click chemistry, an idea that reshaped how chemists think about building complex molecules. Two Nobels, separated by two decades. Very few scientists in history have done that.
And yet in person he is shy, gentle, almost hesitant in his speech. There is no sense of self importance. He seems more interested in the ideas than in the accolades. When he talks, he does so carefully, as if ideas are fragile objects that deserve to be set down softly.
Click chemistry began with a deceptively simple premise. Instead of forcing molecules through elaborate, temperamental reactions, why not design building blocks that join together cleanly and reliably. Reactions that are modular, high yielding, tolerant of water and biological complexity. The copper catalyzed azide alkyne cycloaddition became the emblem of that philosophy. It works with remarkable selectivity. It clicks. Later, others extended this concept into bioorthogonal chemistry, allowing reactions to occur inside living cells without interfering with the machinery of life itself. Today, these reactions are foundational in drug development, materials science, and chemical biology.
But the conversation in his office drifted beyond mechanisms and catalysis. Barry spoke about his father, a surgeon deeply absorbed in his work, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. His mother, by contrast, was outgoing and warm. He credits her influence with keeping him connected to the human world, preventing him from disappearing entirely into abstraction. You can feel that balance in him. The intensity of thought tempered by gentleness.
We spoke about life itself. Its origins. Its fragility. How extraordinary it is that matter organizes into cells, cells into tissues, tissues into minds that can wonder about their father’s time. Barry returns again and again to the intricacy of life. Not as a rhetorical flourish, but as genuine awe. Chemistry, in his telling, is not merely a toolkit. It is a language for describing how the inanimate becomes animate.
As he talks, his fingers drift to the molecular models on his desk. He rotates a bond. He traces a ring of atoms. These small plastic spheres and rods are not props. They are tactile reminders that chemistry is architecture at the smallest scale. Bonds form because electrons seek lower energy. Structures arise because certain arrangements are favored. Out of these simple preferences, staggering complexity emerges.
Photographing him, I was struck by how little the two Nobel Prizes seemed to weigh on the room. They are milestones, certainly. Historic ones. But they feel secondary to the ongoing curiosity that still animates him. In the portrait, he studies a molecular model with deep concentration. Equations hover faintly in the background. His face is lined and thoughtful. The desk is cluttered. The moment feels quiet, almost private.
That question from his daughter echoes in the space. Where have you been spending your time. For Barry Sharpless, the answer lies in chiral catalysts and reactions that click cleanly into place. In decades of searching for simplicity within complexity. But it also lies here, in this office full of memory and meaning, in conversations about fathers and mothers and the improbable emergence of life itself.
