Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Nancy Jiang ’23
Staff Writer
While mRNA vaccine researchers received global attention as favorites for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, according to Chemical and Engineering News, the prize was instead awarded to another field of research that has hugely benefited the pharmaceutical industry. On Oct. 6, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Dr. Benjamin List and Dr. David W.C. MacMillan for their work on “asymmetric organocatalysis.”
Asymmetric organocatalysis allows pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs much more efficiently, while also being cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
Many chemical reactions take several hours, or even several days. To yield a desired compound in a shorter time, chemists use molecules called “catalysts” to fast-forward those reactions without disturbing the composition of the final product. “Catalysis” means to increase the rate of a chemical reaction. “Organocatalysis” is a form of catalysis that uses an organic compound as the catalyst.
Enzymes are naturally-produced organic catalysts commonly found in human bodies, facilitating numerous reactions that are necessary to our daily lives. However, enzymes are large, complex, and extremely difficult to produce artificially. According to the Nobel Prize website, in List’s 1994 research, he discovered that instead of using the entire enzyme, a small molecule called proline catalyzes perfectly by itself, making the process of catalyst-synthesis much more environmentally friendly and cheap.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Moreover, one chemical reaction can form two different molecules that are the same in terms of components and structure but can’t overlap, similar to how we can’t wear a left-hand glove with our right hand. Usually, one of these molecules can serve as a drug while the other might be toxic. Therefore, the ability to drive asymmetric catalysis allows for the production of only the desired beneficial molecules instead of the toxin. On the citation database “Web of Science,” publications citing the term “asymmetric organocatalysis” have exceeded 5500 since List and MacMillan created it 21 years ago, proving its impact in the research field.
Despite its name, “chemistry,” this prize has been awarded to many interdisciplinary fields in science such as biochemistry, neuroscience and materials science. In their report published in 2020, named “Work honored by Nobel prizes clusters heavily in a few scientific fields,” John P.A. Ioannidis and his colleagues found that the five fields that have received over half of the Nobel prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry include “particle physics [14 percent], cell biology [12.1 percent], atomic physics [10.9 percent], neuroscience [10.1%] and molecular chemistry [5.3 percent].” This variation occurs because many subfields have emerged in the fast-evolving world after Alfred Nobel established the award in 1895. Therefore, many discoveries on smaller molecules are grouped into the chemistry category.