The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to two professors for developing a new tool for molecular construction that has helped pharmaceutical research and is also more environmentally friendly. “Building molecules is a difficult art,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a statement announcing the winners. “Benjamin List and David MacMillan are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction: organocatalysis,” the assembly said. “This has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research, and has made chemistry greener.” List, a 53-year-old German professor who is the head of the Max Planck Institute, along with Scottish-born MacMillan, who is also a 53-year-old professor but works at Princeton University in the United States, independently discovered a third type of catalysis in the year 2000. The technique they discovered is called “asymmetric organocatalysis.” The pair’s work has improved chemists’ ability …
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