MacMillan, List win Chemistry Nobel for work on organic catalysts

About the duo

*Benjamin List, 53, is director of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kohlenforschung, Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany

*David MacMillan, 53, is a professor at Princeton University in the United State

*The two scientists have found an “ingenious” new way to build molecules that can be used to make everything from medicines to food flavourings

*They share the prestigious 10-million Swedish crown ($1.14-million) prize in equal parts for breakthroughs achieved independently of one another

Eureka moment

*List said he did not initially know that MacMillan was working on the same subject and figured his hunch might just be a “stupid idea” — until it worked

*“When I saw it worked, I did feel that this could be something big,” he said

STOCKHOLM, October 6

German Benjamin List and Scottish-born David MacMillan won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing new tools for building molecules that have helped make new drugs and are more environmentally friendly.

Their work on asymmetric organocatalysis, which the award-giving body described as “a new and ingenious tool for molecule building”, has also helped in the development of plastics, perfumes and flavours.

“Organic catalysts can be used to drive multitudes of chemical reactions. Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

Catalysts are molecules that remain stable while enabling or speeding up chemical reactions performed in labs or large industrial reactors. Before the laureates’ breakthrough findings at the turn of the millennium, only certain metals and complex enzymes were known to do the trick.

The academy said the new generation of small-molecule catalysts were friendlier to the environment and cheaper to produce, and praised the precision of the new tools.

Before asymmetric catalysis, man-made catalysed substances would often contain not only the desired molecule but also its unwanted mirror image. Sedative thalidomide, which caused deformities in human embryos around six decades ago, were a catastrophic example, it said.

“The fact is, it is estimated that 35 per cent of the world’s total GDP in some way involves chemical catalysis,” it added. Reuters