ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Barry Sharpless

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a bunch of toys that you want to sort out. You want to group them based on their color, but you don't know how to do it. This is similar to what a scientist named Barry Sharpless was trying to do with chemicals.

He wanted to find a way to make chemicals that have the same "colors" stick together. And he came up with a really cool idea called "click chemistry." This idea is like a special way to build things using toy blocks that snap together easily.

With click chemistry, you can build all sorts of things that would have been hard to make before. And this idea has helped lots of other scientists make new medicines and materials that are really important for our world.

So, Barry Sharpless is a really smart scientist who came up with a new way to make chemicals called click chemistry. And he helped lots of other people find new ways to build important things for our world.