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, bioorthogonal 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 Britozzi,

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 concept because we had ideas for how such a chemistry could be

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