Professor Carolyn Bertozzi, who is part of the NexTGen team, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a technique she developed to look at tiny strands of sugar on the surface of our cells. Well, that’s one way of putting it. You could also say she took the kind of complex chemistry that used to require a sterile, high-tech science lab and modernised it for performance inside living organisms. Bertozzi, who works at Stanford University in California, US, named her technique ‘bio-orthogonal chemistry’, which means it occurs in living cells, but doesn’t interfere with other biological processes.