Two scientists win chemistry Nobel for discovering a new way to construct molecules, speeding up drug development
Scientists Benjamin List and David MacMillan won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for discovering a new way to construct molecules. By allowing chemical reactions to happen faster, with fewer steps, their technique, known as asymmetric organocatalysis, has been instrumental in drug development and has allowed chemistry to become more energy efficient and thus “greener.”
It’s all about catalysts. These are substances that speed up the rate of a chemical reaction without themselves being consumed as part of the final product. Traditionally, catalysts were either metals or enzymes. But as members of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry pointed out in a press conference on Wednesday morning in Stockholm, all of that changed around 2000, when List — now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research — and MacMillan — a distinguished university professor of chemistry at Princeton — independently developed a way to use small organic molecules as catalysts, which could more speedily forge together the building blocks that make up compounds.
