The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
The prize is about artificial catalysts. A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a reaction without being consumed. Another way to speed reactions up is to heat them, but that consumes energy and often leads to by-products that must be removed and disposed of.
The "asymmetric" part has to do with one kind of by-product. Some reactions produce 50% of a by-product that must be separated out and disposed of. This happens because some molecules have 3D structure that's different than its mirror image. Think of the way that certain objects like bottle caps and screws only turn one way to tighten. Molecules can have that property (including many drugs you may have taken), and if the handedness is wrong, in many applications, it's a by-product and/or poison. An asymmetric catalyst can make molecules of one handedness selectively, saving material, money, and energy.
The "organocatalysis" part has to do with what the catalyst is made of. Prior to the awardee's research, catalysts tended to contain metal atoms. A few Nobels have been awarded for catalytic processes that use metals.
So metals are great in principle, but in practice have issues. Some metals are linked to toxicity at trace levels. So when preparing drugs, you need to be very careful about purifying out the metal contaminants. Palladium is an example of a very versatile catalytic metal that causes problems during drug manufacture. Metals can also be quite expensive. Platinum and Rhodium are used in both chemical manufacture and in automobile catalytic converters. The price of Rhodium hit $25,000/oz recently. Not all metals are this expensive, but the cost and availability are often a problem.
The awarded work uses catalysts that don't contain metals. Instead, the catalysts contain the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and possibly some other non-metal atoms. In other words, these catalysts are made of the same kinds of atoms as life. (Enzymes catalyze biological reactions.) So now there's a link between biological catalysis and artificial catalysis that didn't exist before.
This work solved a number of practical problems, really went against dogma at the time, and opened up an important area of research that intersects with big questions like the origins of life.
By contrast, every single chemistry poster session or talk seems instead to consist of inscrutable walls of long technical terms and impossibly convoluted flow charts. I’ve often wondered whether this really all makes perfect sense to chemists themselves? Like, if I were to surreptitiously change one syllable out of a 10-syllable word, or reverse a couple of the arrows on a flow chart, would anyone in the audience notice? If not, then why is the information being conveyed in this way, seemingly without any effort at comprehensibility?
Edit: don’t mean to condescend to chemists. The question is a genuine one. Does it really have to be so inaccessible from start to finish? Maybe yes is the answer, that’s the nature of the thing. Physics is not like that, for instance.
I distinctly remember being in a room of biologists and having to explain that, your general STEM audience does not automatically know what a protein is. They were incredulous, but I pointed out that I had to just explain that to a computer scientist like a week prior.
For example to you as a physicist I'm sure I could casually drop the word "force field" and you would know exactly what I'm discussing but a biologist or even chemist wouldn't. But it's such a casually thrown around word in my specialty we will just use it without thinking. Similarly Newtonian physics/classical physics/etc.
Chemistry often deals with the everyday, of course - drugs, paint,fuels, cooking even. However it can also deal with very obscure reactions where the details are entirely technical.
For example, there are whole papers dedicated to "this is the detailed series of steps we found to make this obscure chemical (X) that is difficult to make". That could be summarised as just "we made X!" - not super interesting, by itself...
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that's the same as what we're talking about in this post, but I thought you'd be interested in the personal anecdote. Clear communication is an art that takes years to master. Unfortunately, a lot of academic papers are not meant for a general audience or even an audience of non academic experts.
Yes. Obviously! Someone working in a technical field will understand the jargon and notation of that field.
Certainly if you are working in (say) physical chemistry, you might not be familiar with all the terminolgy of (say) organometallic chemistry, or vice versa.
The question of whether the audience might 'notice' is more tricky, but still bizarre. Certainly, changing (say) one part of a long chemical name might escape attention, but so what?
For example, one catalyst due to the prize winners is :
(5S)-2,2,3-trimethyl-5-phenylmethyl-4-imidazolidinone
if I swapped the '2,2,3-trimethyl' and the '5-phenylmethyl' parts of this, it would be likely non-standard nomenclature, and maybe someone might notice. However the information conveyed would be the same.
URIs can also look inscrutable, but make more sense once you know how to break them down into scheme://user@host:port/path
Chemical names (mostly) work the same way. There are a fair number of rules and concepts, but once you understand them, the endless names map onto structures pretty cleanly[0]. Here are some of them: http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/GenChemReferences/nomenclature_rule...
[0] Mostly. There are some historical exceptions. Acetone should be called something like 2-propanone, for example, but...it isn't.
Any technical field will have its jargon, but the general concept can also (almost always) be explained in a more accessible way (like the hn comment and the article's introduction do).
I've found people that rely on jargon exclusively sometimes don't actually understand the underlying concepts when you ask them questions that dig into it. It's one of the flags that someone is full of shit. Sometimes it's just targeting a narrow audience.
At the same time, the research is usually very narrow. It's hard but possible to convey a general concept in few words, but if you study the properties of a subclass of a subclass of a subclass of a subclass of organic chemicals, you simply have to use terms of art. You don't have the space to explain what a ligand is, or what paramagnetism is, and you don't need to anyway, because your audience likely understands the concepts better than you do.
It's when talking to people that I've noticed a difference. Some people have the jargon, but I can ask questions and learn from them because they can explain the underlying ideas.
Some just hide behind the jargon and can't answer questions - often in the latter the impression I get is that their actual knowledge is pretty shallow. It's not always the case (sometimes people are just bad at communication in general), but it's the case often enough that it's a signal.
It's also something I've noticed more in academia for whatever reason. My off the cuff guess is that both some cultural pressure towards signaling intelligence and prestige is coupled with being hard to understand, and that it's easier to hide with bullshit in academia than in industry. Not that you can't hide in industry too, but entire fields of academia that were total bullshit sometimes perpetuate for decades - companies typically die earlier than that.
When you talk to other practitioners its more important to be precise and succint than it is to be accessible. Just like the opposite is true when talking to the general public. Different audiences have different needs.
Some people do use excessive jargon to sound "smart" (and they are annoying). Anyone who knows what they are doing should be able to communicate in either mode depending on what the situation demands. Just because some people abuse jargon doesn't mean it doesn't have a valid place.
Not sure I understand that point. There are plenty of enzymatic reactions that rely on metals. Presumably the point is that there exist non-metalloenzymes that catalyse enantiospecific reactions?
This is me speculating on the meaning of the original comment, my knowledge of abiogenesis is lacking and I know RNA can do some enzymatic reactions which are also organic compounds.
With regards to abiogenesis, that is a wonderful area for wild speculation. I say that having done a tiny bit of that myself :)
Certainly it would be helpful to have small-molecule catalysts to bootstrap life into having polymer catalysts.
I just do not think it matters much about excluding metals, since there were bound to be sufficient dissolved metal ions floating around. Of course, whether they were the 'right' metals and in a suitable oxidation state and so on is a different question.
Full Disclosure: Am not a chemist but work with chemists, one of which follows MacMillan closely. And have sat through a lot of presentations looking at how different catalysts affect selectivity of products.
EDIT: pretty sure this was Ben List's first paper on this idea: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja994280y
David MacMillan's first paper on this idea: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja000092s
I guess maybe a terrible analogy would be you’re trying to cross a flat field but there is a large group of animals, say, cows in the way. You’d never be able to get through the crowd of cows without exerting a lot of energy. Then suddenly a dog, catalyst, come over and starts shooing off the cows. Now the cows have moved out of the way and the flat field is clear. You can now make the journey while expending less energy.
Hmm maybe someone else can explain it better!
I assume that you meant to say that that one possible product _is_ the mirror image of the other product.
See, in general your statement that reaction products can be mirror images of each other is true for most of the chemical reactions humanity has been able to produce in a lab/factory, yet many reactions don't require separating out 50% of the products because it doesn't matter that they're mirror images if they're non-chiral molecules. Think of the (non-chiral) letter H: a right-handed and left-handed letter H are the same -- one can always be rotated to match the other.
The only time it matters that most of our chemical reactions can produce either left- or right-handed molecules is when these molecules are actually different, meaning they cannot be rotated to match each other. Think of the (chiral in 2D) letter L. There's no way I can rotate the letter L in 2D space to make it match its mirror image. (Of course I can if I'm allowed to rotate it through 3D space.)
I think the original press release already expressed it well in an easy to understand way with the classic hand example:
> where two different molecules can form, which – just like our hands – are each other’s mirror image
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000926149...
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/popular-chemistry...
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-chemistr...
Perhaps a lazy attempt at automatic comment-karma farming?
His work has become a core innovation in organic chemistry so not surprising he gets a Nobel.
And nice to see the Nobel in Chemistry go to a chemist not a biologist!
Regarding MacMillan, his student used proline (which opened the whole proline organocatalysis area) and he said he had "no idea why she did that experiment". He definitely guides his students well.
Instead I wrote code the whole time. No Nobel for that.
Inverting the comment that you were replying to it's akin to saying "I wish I had finished my software engineer degree and made a billion dollar startup instead of getting a chemistry PhD".
marketing is how you get 'autopilots' driving over people (a label that also happens to be banned here in advertisement)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society#Nobel_Laure...
Indeed, 1912.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Institute_for_Coa...
Keep in mind coal research was HUGE in organic chemistry. It was a major source of precursors like aromatic hydrocarbons which fed the dye industry which was the origination of organic chemistry (it led to the sulfonamide antibiotics).
Germany absolutely dominated organic chemistry in the late 1800s/early 1900s. It was the place to be to do organic chemistry. Many of the top organic chemistry journals today (Angewandte Chemie) are still topic tier journals for researchers.
That’s the history of the institute.
;)
(Edit: that turned out to be pretty ELI5 actually. Proceeds to build mirrored molecules from Lego bricks...)
Organic molecules are networks of atoms, with both a distinct connectivity pattern, and a specific 3D orientation [1] of the atoms to each other. See e.g. the Wikipedia page of Lipitor[2] a picture of the connectivity pattern.
We build these molecules through chemical reactions. Over time, we have become pretty good at creating the connectivity patterns we want. However, achieving the correct 3D arrangement is still challenging.
List and MacMillan developed new chemical reactions that enable us to get both the connectivity, and the 3D aspect right. Such new methods are frequent Nobel contenders, and won e.g. in 2001 with Knowles/Noyori/Sharpless.
As for how these reactions work: it is true that they are catalyst-based and that catalysts speed up reactions, but that perspective is a bit misleading. The key point is that without catalysts, these reactions would not happen at all. So the catalysts List&MacMillan found accelerate some desirable reactions so much that they turn from "practically doesn't happen at all" to "done in an hour".
Congratulations to the outstanding work, and to the Nobel price!
[1]: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry) for a deeper look [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atorvastatin [3]: For a deeper look at the chemistry, check out https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/popular-chemistry... and https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-chemistr... -- also shared by _Microft
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/04/science/where...