Nobel Prize in Chemistry for two scientists who developed a tool that creates molecules

Scientists Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their work in developing a new way to create molecules known as “asymmetric organocatalysis”.

According to the Nobel Committee, the German List, which works at the Max Planck Institute, and the Scottish MacMillan, of Princeton University, independently developed a new form of catalysis in 2000.

“This is already of great benefit to humanity”said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, member of the awards jury.

The winners developed “a nice new tool for the construction of molecules: organocatalysis. Its uses include research into new pharmaceuticals and it has also contributed to chemistry being more ecological“according to the Academy.

The Swedish Academy recalled, when announcing the award, that researchers generally believed for a long time that there was only two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes.

This year’s winners “have developed a third type, asymmetric organocatalysis, which relies on small organic molecules “.

This technique “has developed at an astonishing speed. Thanks to these reactions, researchers can now build more efficient everything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules capable of capturing light in solar cells, ”the academy added.

List (Frankfurt, Germany, 1968), questioned whether a complete enzyme was really needed to make a catalyst. To do this, he tested whether an amino acid called proline could catalyze a chemical reaction. “It worked wonderfully,” noted members of the Swedish academy.

MacMillan (Bellshill, United Kingdom, 1968) for his part worked with metallic catalysts easily destroyed by humidity. He wondered if he could develop a more durable type of catalyst using simple organic molecules. “One of them has proven to be excellent in asymmetric catalysis.”

This year’s prize follows the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to scientists Emmanuelle Charpientier and Jennifer Doudna for rewriting the “code of life” and “the development of a method of genome editing“.

The award was announced by Goran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The winners receive a gold medal and SEK 10 million (over $ 1.14 million) from the legacy left by the Prize’s founder, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, upon his death in 1895.

The Nobel Committee awarded on Monday the Medication to the Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries on how the human body perceives temperature and touch it.

That of Physics, announced Tuesday, recognized Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their work on “the physical modeling of the Earth’s climate, the quantification of variability and the reliable prediction of global warming ”, and to Giorgio Parisi for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic scale to the planetary scale”.

In the coming days, the winners will be announced in Literature, peace and economics.

With AP information.

AFG