Straight talk with... Carolyn Bertozzi. Interview by Roxanne Palmer

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.