Professor Thomas Spencer's first teaching job at Dartmouth College was instructing sophomores in Chemistry 51. He describes one of his students as an "obviously very bright, extremely energetic and enthusiastic" young man.
While this may sound like a typical Dartmouth undergraduate, Spencer's former student K. Barry Sharpless '63 has just become the third Dartmouth College alum to win a Nobel Prize.
"It took a lot of time and a lot of things happened in between," said Sharpless, but he knew on Jan. 18, 1980 that he had made a breakthrough that would eventually lead to his winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
"When something is more useful than anything around, its hard to imagine something more useful coming down the road in the next 10 or even 50 years," Sharpless said. "Everything clicked."
Sharpless, who says he "takes in data like a vacuum cleaner," was in the lab at Stanford with another scientist, who came from Japan.
"I had laid the groundwork, but he [the other scientist Katsuki] made a crucial contribution."
"The awarding of a Nobel Prize in this area had been anticipated for a long time," Spencer said. "This was not something he discovered accidentally and easily." "I memorized every smell [in the Dartmouth laboratory]," said Sharpless from his home in California, a day after the announcement of his Nobel Prize. "The sensual aspect is what got me into chemistry ... the smell of the compound is a sacred property."
Like Sharpless, both of Dartmouth's past Nobel Prize winners were recognized for their work in scientific research fields. According to the Office of Public Affairs, Dr. Owen Chamberlain '41 shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for physics with Emilio Segre for the discovery of the anti-proton.
Dr. George Davis Snell '26 was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1980 for research in the area of tissue transplantation. Snell shared the award with researchers from Paris and Boston.
Both Snell and Sharpless received honorary degrees from the College years prior to their Nobel Prize wins, recognizing them for the same achievements that later were honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Chamberlain was awarded an honorary degree in 1991, several decades after winning the Nobel Prize, a distinction that comes with a monetary award.
"The money is the least of it," said Sharpless, who will receive half of the $943,000 prize. Sharpless hopes that the Nobel Prize recognition will open the door for him to converse with scholars studying topics that interest him.
Professor of Chemistry Dave Lemal praised Sharpless, saying "he has wonderful intuition as a scientist." Lemal explained Sharpless' scientific contributions as "reactions that allow one to make molecules in just one mirror image form." Such processes were previously "nature's monopoly," Sharpless said.
Sharpless likes to think of the processes he has invented as tools for others to work with, comparing them to "new chisels for sculptors."
He was inspired by Knowles' research in 1968-1972, which resulted in a process for making a Parkinson's disease drug. Sharpless remains committed to research and finding adventure in his work. "If you can predict what's going to happen, why bother?"
