In industry and research, it is of enormous importance to accelerate chemical processes. This year’s Nobel Laureates in Chemistry developed a new approach. It’s as simple as it is ingenious.
Stockholm – The German Benjamin List and the native Brit 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) this year, but no women.
List and MacMillan – both 53 years old – have developed a new tool for building molecules, asymmetric organocatalysis, they said. It is used, for example, for research into new drugs and has contributed to making chemistry more environmentally friendly. The method is used, for example, in the production of the agent Letermovir against cytomegaloviruses.
Refined accelerators
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 break down our food into tiny components in the digestive tract, for example.
In 2000, List, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, and MacMillan, who teaches at Princeton University in the USA, published studies independently of one another in which they presented examples of a method that was previously underestimated. known today as asymmetric organocatalysis. 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, many people have wondered why we didn’t think about it sooner, ”said Johan Åqvist from the Nobel Committee.
Unwanted reflections
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 often emerged, 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 new class of catalysts, as Peter Schreiner from the University of Giessen emphasized. As Åqvist put it: “Since then the field has completely exploded.”
List, a nephew of the Nobel laureate in medicine, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, showed that an important reaction for connecting two carbon atoms (aldol reaction) can be accelerated by the amino acid proline – and that hardly any undesired mirror image of the target molecule is created.
Fascination with molecules
“It’s a totally fascinating molecule,” said List in an interview broadcast in June about proline. The accelerated reaction was highly contested at the time. It is used in “countless transformations, in the manufacture of drugs, dyes, polymers, in principle everything that chemists do technically”.
MacMillan managed to use organic molecules to speed up the so-called Diels-Alder reaction. Chemists use this reaction to build rings out of carbon atoms. In the introduction to his study, MacMillan coined the term organocatalysis. The process is asymmetrical because mainly only one of two possible mirror images of the product is created.
The German laureate 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. “
MacMillan initially thought of a phone joke when he called from Sweden. MacMillan said at a press conference at Princeton University that he simply could not believe that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was calling from Stockholm and that is why he did not answer the phone at first. The Academy left him a message on the answering machine, but hadn’t reached him when they announced the awards. After he did get the news, he felt “dazed, confused, incredibly excited, surreal and still trying to find my feet,” said the researcher, who now has both British and US citizenship.
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.
Seven women honored
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.
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 next Monday, October 11th, with the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics donated by the Swedish Reichsbank. dpa
