Carolyn Bertozzi moves through the world with the same restless curiosity that animates her science. To sit with her, even for an hour or two, is to witness a mind in constant motion, bridging molecules and metaphors, leaping from biochemistry to music, from the structure of sugars to the harmonics of sound. When I photographed her at her office and lab at Stanford on November 21, 2022, I had the distinct feeling that I was in the presence of a person who does not merely study life at its most fundamental level, she engages with it.
Our conversation began in the way most conversations with great scientists do: with an almost childlike excitement for discovery. Bertozzi’s field is glycobiology, the study of the sugars that coat our cells and, in their silent, intricate arrangements, dictate much of what happens in the body, how cells communicate, how diseases spread, how the immune system recognizes friend from foe. For years, glycobiology remained something of a backwater, a territory too complex and uncharted for all but the most intrepid researchers. But Bertozzi has always thrived in places where others hesitate to tread.
She spoke with the casual clarity of someone who has spent years making the invisible visible. “Sugars are the language of life,” she explained. “But unlike DNA or proteins, we haven’t had a good way to read them, let alone manipulate them.” Her breakthrough came in the 1990s, when she developed a technique known as bioorthogonal chemistry, a term that sounds dense until you hear her describe it. Essentially, she devised a way to tag and track sugars in living organisms without disturbing the system, a molecular sleight of hand that opened up entirely new ways of studying biology. The implications were enormous. With bioorthogonal chemistry, researchers could watch cancer cells in real-time, track infections as they spread, and even engineer new kinds of therapies.
It was for this work that Bertozzi was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless. Their collective discoveries in click chemistry, methods of rapidly and precisely joining molecules, have transformed the landscape of drug development and medical research. Bertozzi’s specific contribution was to extend these techniques into the realm of living cells, enabling scientists to chemically alter biological systems with a precision previously thought impossible.
But what struck me most about Bertozzi was not the grandeur of her achievements, it was her playfulness. Midway through our chat, she noticed a bass guitar leaning against the wall. Without hesitation, she picked it up and began strumming, the chords resonating against the chemical equations scrawled on the whiteboard behind her. It was a fitting image: a scientist as much an improviser as a theorist, as much an artist as an engineer. “I was in a band in grad school,” she told me, grinning. “It was called Bored of Education.”
This dual nature, rigorous yet irreverent, precise yet creative, is perhaps what makes her work so revolutionary. Science, after all, is not merely a process of accumulating knowledge but of seeing patterns, of making connections where none seemed to exist before. And Bertozzi has done this not just in the realm of chemistry, but in the culture of science itself. She has long been an advocate for diversity in STEM, a mentor to young scientists, and an outspoken voice for inclusivity in academia.
As I packed up my camera and prepared to leave, she offered one final reflection, almost as an afterthought: “You know, the best discoveries usually start with a ridiculous idea.” She said it with the confidence of someone who has proven this to be true, time and time again.
Watching her, bass in hand, chemical structures swirling behind her, I couldn’t help but think that her own career had been one long, brilliant improvisation, each discovery a chord change, each insight a new melody.
