Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to a tool for building molecules

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan for their development of a new tool for building molecules, work that has spurred advances in pharmaceutical research and reduced the impact of chemistry on the ‘environment.

Their work, while invisible to consumers, is an essential part of many high-tech industries and is vital for research.

Chemists are among those responsible for building molecules capable of forming elastic and durable materials, storing energy in batteries, or inhibiting the progression of disease.

But this work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and speed up chemical reactions without being part of the final product.

“For example, catalysts in cars turn toxic substances in exhaust gases into harmless molecules,” the Nobel committee said in a statement. “Our bodies also contain thousands of catalysts in the form of enzymes, which chisel the molecules necessary for life.”

The problem was that there were only two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes.

In 2000, Dr List and Dr MacMillan – working independently of each other – developed a third type of catalysis.

This is called asymmetric organocatalysis and relies on small organic molecules.

“This concept of catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we had not thought of it sooner,” said Johan Aqvist, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Who are the winners?

Dr MacMillan is a Scottish chemist and professor at Princeton University, where he also chaired the chemistry department from 2010 to 2015. He received his doctorate. in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1996 before accepting a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. His research focused on innovative concepts in synthetic organic chemistry.

Dr List is a German chemist born in Frankfurt and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. He got his doctorate. in 1997 from Goethe University in Frankfurt, before being appointed Assistant Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in California. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany.