Lesbian, Bisexual Scientists Receive Nobel Prizes
The Nobel laureates accepting their prizes at the ceremony in Stockholm this weekend included two LGBTQ+ winners.Carolyn Bertozzi, a lesbian who’s a chemistry professor at Stanford University in California, shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with Morten Meldal, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Scripps Research professor and 1968 Stanford alum K.
Barry Sharpless. Their prize was for “the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” the Nobel organization announced in October.Geneticist Svante Pääbo, a bisexual Swedish man now working in Germany, received the prize in physiology or medicine “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” according to the organization.“Chemists are dreamers.
We think up new molecules and bring them to life,” Bertozzi said at the Saturday ceremony, United Press International reports.In an interview with Gay City News in October, she said she thought at first that she was hallucinating when she heard about the award. “I was like, Oh, my God, this cannot be happening,” she said.She also told the publication that the prize offers her the “opportunity to cast the light on all the wonderful things that chemists bring to the world.”Bertozzi’s research group “profiles changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and bacterial infection, and uses this information to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology,” the Stanford website explains.Pääbo “pioneered the now-booming field of ancient DNA research,” Science magazine notes.
