

Nobel Prize in chemistry honors 'greener' way to build molecules used for medicines to food flavoring

David Keyton and Frank Jordans
Associated Press

STOCKHOLM — Two scientists won the Nobel Prize for chemistry Wednesday for finding an "ingenious" new way to build molecules that can be used to make everything from medicines to food flavorings.

Benjamin List of Germany and Scotland-born David W.C. MacMillan developed "asymmetric organocatalysis" — work that has already had a significant impact on pharmaceutical research, said Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The tool has also made chemistry "greener," the judges said.

"It's already benefiting humankind greatly," said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel panel.


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"But in the year 2000, everything changed," said Wittung-Stafshede.

List, of the Max Planck Institute, and MacMillan, of Princeton University, independently reported that small organic molecules can be used to do the same job as big enzymes and metal catalysts in reactions that "are precise, cheap, fast and environmentally friendly," she said. "This new toolbox is used widely today, for example, in drug discovery and in fine chemicals production."

Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said: "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."

Speaking after the announcement, List said the award was a "huge surprise."

"I absolutely didn't expect this," the 53-year-old said, adding that he was on vacation in Amsterdam when the call from Sweden came in.

List said he did not initially know that MacMillan was working on the same subject and figured his hunch might just be a "stupid idea" — until it worked. 

"I did feel that this could be something big," he said.


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