The two winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are the German Benjamin List and the English David WC MacMillan.
The announcement this morning by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, which has decided to award the coveted award "for the development of an asymmetric organocatalysis", a new tool for molecular construction that has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research and made chemistry "greener".
Many research areas and industries depend on the ability of chemists to build molecules capable of forming elastic and durable materials, storing energy in batteries or inhibiting the progression of diseases. This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product. For example, car catalysts transform toxic substances in exhaust fumes into harmless molecules. Our bodies also contain thousands of catalysts in the form of enzymes, which bypass the molecules necessary for life.
Catalysts are therefore fundamental tools for chemists, but the researchers believed that there were, in principle, only two types of catalysts: metals and enzymes. Until Benjamin List and David MacMillan, in 2000, developed a third type of catalis, the “asymmetric organocatalysis” which is based on small organic molecules.
Organanocatalysis has developed at an astonishing speed since 2000, although 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.
WHO AM I - Benjamin List, 53, was born in Frankfurt, Germany, where he graduated in 1997. He currently directs the Max Plank Institute with a specialization in research on catalysis.
David WC MacMillan is the same age, 53, and was born in 1968 in Great Britain, in Bellshill. He studied in the United States, where he graduated in 1966 from the University of California at Irvine. He currently teaches at Princeton University.
(Unioneonline / vl)
