Moscow. October 6. INTERFAX.RU – Benjamin List (Germany) and David McMillan (USA) became Nobel Prize winners in chemistry in 2021. The prize was awarded for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.
The website of the Nobel Committee, which broadcasts the ceremony of announcing the winners, also published a press release about the research of scientists.
The cash prize of SEK 10 million (over $ 1.14 million) will be split equally between the two laureates.
It was believed that there are only two types of catalysts: metals and enzymes. Independently of each other, List and McMillan developed a new way of building molecules – asymmetric organocatalysis, based on small organic molecules. It is used as a basis for research into new pharmaceuticals and is helping to make chemistry more environmentally friendly, according to a press release from the Nobel Committee.
“Organocatalysis is progressing at an astonishing rate. Using such reactions, researchers can now more efficiently create anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can absorb light in solar panels,” it says.
Liszt was born in 1968 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1997. He is currently the head of one of the research institutes of the Max Planck Society for Scientific Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany.
Macmillan was born in 1968 in the Scottish town of Bellshill. He later moved to the United States. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine. He is now a professor at Princeton University.
In recent years, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for discoveries at the interface with biology. In 2020, the award went to Emmanuelle Charpentier (Max Planck Institute for Infectious Biology) and Jennifer Doudna (University of California, Berkeley) “for the development of genome editing.” In 2018, the winners were Francis Arnold for Directed Enzyme Evolution, and George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter for Peptide and Antibody Phage Display.
Earlier on October 4, the Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology were announced. The winners were US researchers David Julius and Ardem Pataputyan. They were awarded the prize for the discovery of temperature and touch receptors.
On October 5, the physics laureates became known. The awards went to Giorgio Parisi, Klaus Hasselman and Shukuro Manabe for their “pioneering contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.”
On October 7, the new Nobel Prize laureate in literature will be announced.
