In industry and research, it is of enormous importance to accelerate chemical processes.
This year's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have developed a new approach to this.
It's as simple as it is ingenious.
Stockholm - The German Benjamin List and the Scottish-born, US-based researcher David WC MacMillan received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a sophisticated method to accelerate chemical reactions.
This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday.
List is the second Nobel Prize winner from Germany this year after climate researcher Klaus Hasselmann (physics).
A total of seven men were successful in the natural science Nobel Prizes (medicine, physics, chemistry), but no women.
List and MacMillan (both 53 years old) have developed a new tool for building molecules, asymmetric organocatalysis, it said.
It is used to research new drugs and has contributed to making chemistry more environmentally friendly.
Catalysts accelerate chemical reactions without being consumed themselves.
Put simply, they help molecule A transform into molecule B.
The importance of catalysts is therefore immense; practically no chemical process in industry can do without them.
For a long time, the focus was on two types of catalytic converters: metals, which are used, for example, to process exhaust gases in cars, and enzymes, which, for example, break down our food into tiny components in our digestive tract.
In 2000, List, director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, and MacMillan, who teaches at Princeton University, published studies independently of one another in which they presented examples of a method that was previously underrated, which is now known as asymmetric organocatalysis is known.
The two researchers showed that simple molecules, often obtained from natural substances, act as catalysts as efficiently as metals.
These organic molecules have decisive advantages: They are comparatively cheap, generally harmless to humans and nature, and can be easily recycled.
“This concept of catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious.
In fact, a lot of people have wondered why we didn't think about it earlier, ”said Johan Åqvist from the Nobel Committee.
Organocatalysis itself was not entirely new before 2000. But before List and MacMillan, it had a decisive shortcoming: the yield of the desired product was not large enough. In addition, the unwanted mirror image of the molecule was often created, but this can have completely different properties. This can have life-threatening consequences, especially with medication. List and MacMillan got this problem under control with their approaches - and thus gave the go-ahead for a whole new class of catalysts, as Peter Schreiner from the University of Giessen emphasizes.
The German award winner Benjamin List was sitting in an Amsterdam café when he was informed of his award by telephone.
“When we were about to order, I saw" Sweden "on the display.
I looked at my wife, we smiled ironically - "Haha, that's the call."
As a joke.
But then it really was the call.
It was really amazing.
An unbelievable moment. "
The most prestigious award for chemists this year is endowed with a total of ten million crowns (around 980,000 euros).
The award ceremony traditionally takes place on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to 185 different researchers.
One of them, the Briton Frederick Sanger, received it twice.
So far, seven women have been among the winners, for example Marie Curie in 1911, who discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium.
In 2020 it went to the French Emmanuelle Charpentier, who works in Berlin, and to the US researcher Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of gene scissors for targeted genetic modification.
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On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to David Julius (USA) and the Lebanon-born researcher Ardem Patapoutian for work on the senses of temperature and touch.
On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the Hamburg meteorologist Klaus Hasselmann, among others.
He shares half of the price with the Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe.
Both created a solid physical foundation for our knowledge of climate change.
The other half goes to the Italian Giorgio Parisi for his work on understanding complex systems.
This year's Nobel Prize winners for Literature and Peace will be announced on Thursday and Friday.
The series ends on the following Monday, October 11th, with the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics donated by the Swedish Reichsbank.
dpa