2010 is shaping up to be a big year for carbon at the Nobel Prize committee. After awarding the prize in physics to two Russian-born scientists for their research on the ultra-thin carbon construction known as Graphene, the committee has given the prize in chemistry to three professors who developed a tool for create carbon-carbon bonds.
Two of the professors are U.S.-based–Richard Heck of the University of Delaware and Ichi Negishi of Perdue. The third, Akira Suzuki, is a professor at Japan’s Hokkaido University.
The committee had the following to say about the trio’s work,
This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals, for example carbon-based molecules as complex as those created by nature itself.
The tool is known as palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling–I’m sure it’ll get a slicker name, once Hollywood gets its hands on it. Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling has a wide range of potential uses in fields like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and electronics.
“The key word here is versatility,” Negishi told CNN. “One of our dreams is to be able to synthesize any organic compounds of importance, whether it is medicinally important compounds … or important from the point of view of material science. And we believe that our technology or our chemistry will be applicable to a very wide range of compounds, without knowing what they might be.”
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