Pair with California ties share Nobel in chemistry
David MacMillan, who earned his doctorate from UC Irvine and served as a scientist at Pasadena’s Caltech, is the winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, an honor he shares with Benjamin List, a former student and assistant professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, it was announced Wednesday.
MacMillan and List were honored for their development of a tool for molecular construction called organocatalysis. The pair’s work has allowed scientists to make a variety of compounds, including medicines and pesticides more cheaply, efficiently, safely and with less hazardous waste.
“It’s already benefiting humankind greatly,” said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel panel.
“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,” Johan Aqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in the release.
MacMillan, born in Bellshill, United Kingdom, in 1968, is a professor at Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. from UC Irvine in 1996 and was a scientist at UC Berkeley and Caltech. MacMillan was advised through the course of his graduate studies at UCI by Larry Overman, a distinguished professor emeritus of chemistry.
Overman said in a statement on UCI’s website that the award will be welcomed by the chemistry community because the organocatalytic chemical synthesis methods developed by MacMillan are used every day around the world in the discovery and development of new medicines.
“What sets Dave apart is his remarkable creativity and vision,” Overman said. “These attributes, together with his delightful personality were apparent early in his graduate studies at UCI.”
List was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1968 and is the director of the MaxPlanck-Institut fur Kohlenforschung in Germany.
The chemistry prize focused on the making of molecules. That requires linking atoms together in specific arrangements, an often difficult and slow task. Until the beginning of the millennium, chemists had only two methods — or catalysts — to speed up the process, using complicated enzymes or metal catalysts.
That all changed when MacMillan and List independently reported that small organic molecules can be used to do the job. The new tools have been important for developing medicines and minimizing drug manufacturing glitches, including problems that can cause harmful side effects.
Aqvist called the method as “simple as it is ingenious.”