Science: Nobel Results

It looks like this was a pretty good year for chemistry, at least with respect to Nobel Prizes.  Long overdue, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki for palladium-catalyzed cross coupling reaction for work that was developed in the 1970s.  Specifically, they developed the chemical reactions appropriately but rather obviously named Heck reaction, Negishi coupling, and Suzuki coupling (chemists tend to be narcissists---one of the great honors of synthetic chemistry is to have a chemical reaction named after you).  Sadly for Lisa Simpson, her guess was in the right area of chemistry but the wrong name---Sonogashira and Kumada are other early pioneers in the field, but the impact of their research has been less felt and the Nobel rule of three left them out.

What's exciting is that this year the Prize was actually given to research in chemistry itself rather than being bumped by something in physics or biology.  It's personally exciting to me since my graduate and post-doctoral research was in a similar field, focusing on developing new catalysts for chemical reactions.  It's been a good string of wins catalysis---it seems like every 5 years or so, the Nobel Prize is given to an advancement in some area of catalysis.  Knowles, Noyori, and Sharpless won the 2001 Prize for asymmetric catalysis and Chauvin, Schrock and Grubbs won the 2005 Prize for olefin metathesis.

Why this is so cool is that chemistry is essentially the science of molecules and synthetic chemistry is the science of making molecules.  Making molecules can be pretty hard, but catalysts can make our lives much easier.  Catalysts are small amounts of a specific molecule that can direct and transform other molecules into new ones.  The kicker is that the catalyst can run this reaction thousands if not millions of times, so you only need a small amount of a catalyst to generate a large amount of your product.  Generally, the most powerful catalysts tend to be molecules containing precious metals like palladium, rhodium, or ruthenium (for example, this is why you have rhodium in your catalytic converters---the rhodium can capture and transform the emissions from your exhaust).  For this year's Prize, palladium is the catalyst used to connect carbon-carbon bonds together to form more complicated structures.  The reactions developed by Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki generally follow the same mechanism with slightly different starting reagents.  What's incredible about these reactions is that they're extremely robust---they're clean reactions that make few unwanted side-products and you can run these reactions to make products on the ton-scale, which has been used to make molecules from complex pharmaceuticals to materials and even polymers.

Sadly, while this is pretty exciting news for chemists everywhere, there's been barely a mention in the mainstream press.  I guess it is a pretty esoteric topic to effectively communicate to non-chemists.   Metathesis, which won in 2005, at least had a catchy dance movie in the press release that all the prime time news shows played.  Still, this is a Nobel that's long been expected and well-deserved.

In another coup for chemistry, arguably the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of graphene would have been suitable for the chemistry prize as well.  Graphene is essentially a single molecular layer of graphite, one of the allotropes of carbon (the others being diamond and fullerenes/buckeyballs).  It's similar to an extended chain of fused benzenes---and just like benzene, there are pairs of electrons in high energy p orbitals (unlike diamond, where the electrons are in more stable orbitals resulting in a very stable structure).  Since the rings are fused together, the electrons are delocalized and can flow, resulting in some interesting electrical and thermal conductivity properties.  What's exciting is that this could potentially play a role in developing new materials and replacing older metal-based conductors.  Fun fact:  if you take a sheet of graphene and roll it up, you get a carbon nanotube, which also have very interesting new material properties since you can now think about directing electrical current in a specific direction on the nano-scale.