Andre Isaacs, chemist and TikTok star
Sharing molecules, moves and messages of inclusion
When the 2022 Nobel prize in chemistry winners were announced, it wasn’t just the reaction videos from Bertozzi, Meldal and Sharpless that I was keen to watch.
Andre Isaacs – an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, US, who is better known as @drdre4000 to his nearly 400,000 TikTok followers – dropped his reaction video a few hours after the announcement. Wearing his iconic rainbow tie-dyed labcoat, Isaacs concisely shared the science of both click and bioorthogonal chemistry, before reflecting more peronally on the news.
‘This award is so amazing to me because it’s the foundation of the research I do in my lab, and also because Carolyn Bertozzi is the eighth woman to have ever won the Nobel prize in chemistry out of 189 recipients,’ said Isaacs. ‘Additionally, she’s the first [known] LGBTQ+ person to have won the Nobel prize in chemistry.’