Like Carrig and Bakke, John Sharpless, a University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor, and former state insurance commissioner Jo Musser have moderate leanings.

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To be able to make drugs from its gene data, one biotech bought a company founded by Nobel Prize winner K. Barry Sharpless.

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From the late 1960s onward, William Knowles, Ryoji Noyori, Barry Sharpless and Henri Kagan, among others, began to develop catalysts that made great quantities of single enantiomers very fast.

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Just as a mould can be used to make a copy of a three-dimensional object, Dr Sharpless proposes to use biological targets as templates to guide the formation of their own perfect drugs.

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For instance, K. Barry Sharpless , who shares this year's chemistry prize, founded a company called Coelecanth , which was bought by Lexicon Genetics (nasdaq: LEXG - news - people) in July.

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Dr Sharpless goes even further.

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