Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors Technique For Synthesizing Complex Compounds
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Japan for developing chemical reactions that enable the building of complex organic compounds with wide application in medicine, industry and agriculture. The key to all three slightly different reactions is the element palladium, a relatively rare silvery-white metal that provides a setting that allows carbon atoms or compounds with carbon in them to bond to each other. Forming such carbon-to-carbon bonds is the key to synthesizing natural compounds in larger quantities, such as discodermolide, which was isolated from a Caribbean sponge and shows tumor-fighting properties.The three chemists, working independently, arrived at slightly different versions of the reaction, which takes advantage of palladium's capacity to bring two carbon atoms close enough to bond. Carbon is the essential building block of organic chemistry and...