The two scientists are being honored for developing a “brilliant” new instrument for building molecules, as the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Wednesday. The so-called asymmetric organocatalysis is important for drug research and has made chemistry more environmentally friendly. The chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Johan Aquvist, said the instrument would now enable researchers to manufacture many products more efficiently, from new drugs to solar cells. “In this way, organocatalysts bring the greatest benefit to mankind.”
The 53-year-old List comes from Frankfurt and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr. The same old MacMillan is originally from Scotland and is a professor at the US elite University Princeton. They will share the prize money of 10 million kroner (around 985,000 euros).
List: “Thought someone was joking”
List said he hadn’t expected the call from Stockholm at all. “I thought someone was joking. I was just having breakfast with my wife, ”said the chemist who was present at the press conference. Every year, when the Nobel Prize is awarded, his wife jokes that he should keep an eye on his phone. “But today we didn’t even make the joke.”
In 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the inventors of the gene scissors, the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the US scientist Jennifer Doudna. The Nobel Prizes for Medicine and Physics were awarded on Monday and Tuesday: The Nobel Prize for Medicine went to US researchers David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. The German climate researcher Klaus Hasselmann received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with his US-Japanese colleague Syukuro Manabe and the Italian Giorgio Parisi.
–
