known for his work on stereoselective reactions.
Sharpless was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Friends' Central School
in 1959. He continued his studies at Dartmouth College
(1963) and earned his Ph.D from Stanford University
in 1968. He continued post-doctoral work at Stanford University and Harvard University
. He holds honorary degree of Technical University of Munich
.
Sharpless has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and Stanford University.
We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method. 
...when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.
The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.