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Research that won a Nobel Prize a couple years back

could specifically target cancerous tumors much better than traditional chemotherapy can.

So you get this burst of toxic drug only in the tumor and nowhere else in the body,

and it kills the tumor without these toxic side effects.

It's Monday, December 2nd, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm SciFri producer Deep Petersmith.

We're continuing to celebrate our 33rd anniversary with some of our listeners' favorite segments.

And you know what?

High on that list was this 2022 conversation with Nobel Prize winning chemist Dr. Carolyn Bertotzi.

Here's her conversation with Arafledo.

Today, bio-orthogonal chemistry is a staple in biological research and a promising tool for medicine.

These reactions involve two chemicals that can bond with each other, even in an environment as complicated as the human body.

And they don't interfere with the normal chemical reactions in the body.

Its pioneer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her research.

Let me bring her on now. Dr. Carolyn Bertotsi, 2022 Nobel Prize laureate and professor of chemistry

at Stanford in Palo Alto, California. Congratulations and welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much.

It's really wonderful to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, let's start with the basics. What does it mean for chemistry to be bio-orthogonal? Pretty big word there.

Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful, but you can break it down into its two parts. So the word orthogonal is one that we usually use when we're trying to describe two things that

don't interact with each other. When someone is really thinking outside the box or in a very

different way, we like to think of that as orthogonal thinking. So bio-orthogonal means not

interacting with biology, totally separate from biology. And we invented that

...