Nobel honors greener way to build molecules
Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for finding an ingenious and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules — an approach now used to make a variety of compounds, including medicines and pesticides.
The work of Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan has allowed scientists to produce those molecules more cheaply, efficiently, safely and with significantly less hazardous waste.
“It’s already benefiting humankind greatly,” said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel panel.
It was the second day in a row that a Nobel rewarded work that had environmental implications. The physics prize honored developments that expanded our understanding of climate change, just weeks before the start of global climate negotiations in Scotland.
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 either complicated enzymes or metal catalysts.
That all changed when List, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and MacMillan, of Princeton University in New Jersey, 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.
Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel panel, called the method as “simple as it is ingenious.”
“The fact is that many people have wondered why we didn’t think of it earlier,” he added.
MacMillan said that winning the prize left him “stunned, shocked, happy, very proud.”
“I grew up in Scotland, a working-class kid. My dad’s a steelworker. My mom was a home help. … I was lucky enough to get a chance to come to America, to do my Ph.D.,” he said.
In fact, he said at a news conference in Princeton, he was planning to follow his older brother into physics, but the physics classes in college were at 8 a.m. in a cold and leaky classroom in rainy Scotland, while the chemistry courses were two hours later in warmer, drier spaces. As he told that story, he said he could hear his wife pleading with him not to share it.
His said the inspiration for his Nobel-winning work came when thinking about the dirty process of making chemicals — one that requires precautions he likened to those taken at nuclear power plants.
If he could devise a way of making medicines faster by completely different means that didn’t require vats of metal catalysts, the process would be safer for both workers and the planet, he reasoned.