Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 2010 Announced

(October 07, 2010) Three scientists, two Japanese and an American researcher who designed the technique to bind together carbon atoms, a key step in assembling the skeletons of organic compounds used in medicine, agriculture and electronics have been selected to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Their work in the 1960s and 1970s provided one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today to create sophisticated chemicals, the Nobel committee said. The winners are Richard Heck, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, now living in the Philippines; Ei-ichi Negishi, 75, a chemistry professor at Purdue University in Indiana and Akira Suzuki, 80, a retired professor from Hokkaido University in Japan. Carbon atoms are normally shy about pairing up. The winning approach was to use atoms of the metal palladium kind of like a singles bar, a place where pairs of carbon atoms are jammed together and encouraged to bond. This idea, called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling, was easier to do than previous methods. Altogether, their methods are now widely used in industry and research. In agriculture, the palladium approach is used to make chemicals that protect crops from fungi and other pests. Heck's work was adapted to make the cancer drug Taxol, steroids and morphine. The Nobel committee said. Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Maryland, said the three winners did very fundamental and important work. The awards were established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and are always handed out on December 10, the anniversary of his death in 1896.