Chemistry Nobel for Discovering Catalysts Used for Carbon-Carbon Bonding of Complex Molecules. (October 7, 2010)

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Richard F. Heck, University of Delaware, USA; Ei-ichi Negishi, Purdue University, USA, and Akira Suzuki, Hokkaido University, Japan "for the development of palladium-catalysed cross coupling in organic synthesis".

In the estimate of the Nobel Committee: "This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals, for example carbon-based molecules as complex as those created by nature itself". Without it the modern pharmaceutical industry couldn't exist.

Eric Jacobsen, Harvard University's Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology notes: "Of all methodologies developed over the past 50 years, it is safe to say that palladium-catalysed cross-coupling methodologies have had the biggest impact on how organic compounds are made. Cross-coupling methods are now used in all facets of organic synthesis, but nowhere more so than in the pharmaceutical industry, where they are used on a daily basis by nearly every practicing medicinal chemist."

The announcement of the Prize was introduced by Professor Staffan Normark, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Nobel Laureates' work was presented in more detail by Professors Lars Thelander and Jan-Erling Bäckvall.