Last month, Carolyn Bertozzi became the first woman to win the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-Lemelson Prize, a $500,000 award that honors midcareer inventors. Bertozzi, a chemical biologist, works to understand how sugars mediate cell-to-cell communication. But she isn’t content with just observing the process; her lab at the University of California–Berkeley has pioneered tools for labeling molecules inside living cells. Her biomedical inventions have contributed to the development of noninvasive methods for identifying disease tissue within the body—advances that could revolutionize both the diagnosis and the treatment of a host of diseases ranging from arthritis to cancer. Roxanne Palmer recently caught up with her by phone to discuss Bertozzi’s sweet success with cell surface sugars. (Click here to continue reading)