by Minhaj Masoodi
SRINAGAR: The Royal Swedish Academy for Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organo-catalysis.”
“Building molecules is a difficult art. Benjamin List and David MacMillan are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction: organo-catalysis. This has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research and has made chemistry greener, the Nobel Prize Organization announced on their website.
Many research areas and industries are dependent on chemists’ ability to construct molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of diseases. This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product.
“Catalysts are thus fundamental tools for chemists, but researchers long believed that there were, in principle, just two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes. Benjamin List and David MacMillan are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 because in 2000 they, independent of each other, developed a third type of catalysis. It is called asymmetric organocatalysis and builds upon small organic molecules,” said Johan Åqvist, who is chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “This concept for catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we didn’t think of it earlier.”
“Benjamin List and David MacMillan remain leaders in the field and have shown that 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. In this way, organo-catalysts are bringing the greatest benefit to humankind,” said the Committee in the press statement.
The statement further read, “Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can attach. These often contain common elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorus. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.”
The rapid expansion in the use of organic catalysts is primarily due to their ability to drive asymmetric catalysis. When molecules are being built, situations often occur where two different molecules can form, which – just like our hands – are each other’s mirror image. Chemists will often only want one of these, particularly when producing pharmaceuticals.
Born in 1968 in Frankfurt, Germany, Benjamin List is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute of Coal Research and Professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne.
Notably, his aunt, Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard had also won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1995.
David MacMillan was born in Bellshill, United Kingdom and is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he was also the Chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2010 to 2015.
