On Mar. 31, 2019, the American Chemical Society awarded the Priestley Medal to K. Barry Sharpless “to recognize distinguished services to chemistry,” the Society’s most prestigious award.

Sharpless is a two-time Nobel laureate in Chemistry known for his work on stereoselective reactions and click chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions. But at the same time, he was also lecturing on a new method he’d invented for the rapid discovery of useful chemical function—click chemistry used reliable, spring-loaded, easy to-perform reactions to ‘click’ together molecular building blocks with desirable properties.