Meet Smart Scientists Heck, Negishi and Suzuki who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2010 for their work on catalysts
Nobel Prize winners Heck, Suzuki and Negishi were immortalised on postage stamps!
Why not share this information about scientists Heck, Negishi and Suzuki with your students? Their collaboration into using palladium as a catalyst to create structures from carbon has vastly improved the ability of chemists to produce complex organic molecules.
The team that won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2010 for their work on catalysts
The Nobel Prizes are awards that go to people whose work has been important in their area of expertise. In 2010 the prize for chemistry was shared by a team of three scientists ‘for palladium-catalysed cross couplings in organic synthesis’. The scientists were American Richard Heck and Japanese scientists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki.
Let’s take a closer look at their work so you can understand why it was so worthy of a Nobel Prize.
All life on Earth is made up of compounds that contain carbon, from the coloured pigments in a butterfly’s wings to the antibiotics we use to cure infections. Scientists are designing a wide range of structures out of carbon including electronics, light yet strong sports equipment and systems to deliver drugs to their target in the body. So, being able to design new carbon compounds, is a very useful and exciting area of chemistry.
But the big problem is that carbon atoms are very unresponsive – they don’t like joining up with each other. This makes it very difficult for scientists to design new carbon structures. They have to use complicated reactions to get them to join, which results in products which they don’t want.
The project that won the Nobel Prize developed a palladium catalyst which acts as a surface for the carbon atoms to meet and join. Because of its success scientists are now able to build increasingly more complex, and useful, structures out of carbon. This work will have a direct impact on your life – you may already have used a product that has been built using this new catalyst.
The medal displayed on the outside of the Nobel Prize centre
Did you know?
It is quite common for scientists from different places in the world to work as a team on research projects. This collaboration means that knowledge is shared and problems can be solved together.
Carbon nanotubes are very small tubes that are made up of carbon atoms joined together. They have a diameter of around 1nm (there are 1 million nm in one mm!). They are extremely strong and can be used in electrical wiring, building and sports equipment.