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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded
An anonymous reader writes "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2005 has been jointly awarded to Robert H. Grubbs (California Institute of Technology), Richard R. Schrock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Yves Chauvin (Institut Français du Pétrole) for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis." Advanced [PDF] and supplementary [PDF] information is also available from the Nobel Prize site.
So does that mean that we can build long chain carbon molecules like, say, gasoline, out of other organic material like, say, chicken shit? 'Cause that's what I'm imagining.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I took a class (Ch41, Chemistry of Covalent Compounds) from Professor Grubbs, and he is an excellent teacher as well as a great scientist. He can also take a joke. The following was published in Nothing, an unofficial humor paper published by a couple of bored Techers, and based by a standard lecture that Grubbs gave to every Organic Chemistry class before their first test.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
That's what Yves Chauvin is.
3 78142,00.html g econtent?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de% 2Fwissenschaft%2Fmensch%2F0%2C1518%2C378142%2C00.h tml
He wants to live reclusively, and doesn't plan to go to Sweden to receive his medal.
Source: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,
translation: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pa
Yes, yes, that's very interesting and all, but what I want to know is who won the Nobel Prize this year for "Attempted Chemistry?"
"Metathesis can be compared to a dance in which the couples change partners."
Whoo hoo! Grubbs, Shrock and Chauvin have done a great service to married SlashDotters.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I think you're thinking of the physics award. This one's for chemistry, a related but separate field of science. I'm also sorry to hear that you find Nobel prize winner's stories "dull", I can not imagine what other greatness you must aspire too.
Uhhhh....Congratulations???
Prizes are for children.
-- Charles Ives, upon being given, but refusing, the
Pulitzer prize
http://cubemonkey.net/quotes -- fortune-mod quote generator
I'd just like to be the first to congratulate you on being a complete dumbass!!
They used to have the good habit of giving Nobel Prizes in Chemistry for physical chemistry, clean spectroscopical experiments, nice theories with lots of equations, sophisticated mathematics, quantum theories etc. Many physicists, not olny chemists, magaged to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Not anymore, now smelly, organic chemistry and biochemistry grab everything! Think urine and meat and blood and saliva analyses and other gross things! I am VERY disappointed!
>> This represents a great step forward for "green chemistry",
Wow they must be smart, mine always comes out an icky brown colour.
I think it's interesting how many nobel prizes have been given for work on the C=C bond: Diels-Alder, Wittig, reduction, oxidation... I think that more nobels have been given for x-ray techniques than anything else, but this must be well up there. (Of course that depends on how broadly you classify your groupings.)
But this particular synthesis is already producing some amazing results in bioactive materials, and it should be a strong industrial technique, given its apparent robustness. Back when I was doing organic chemistry, I was trying to make a weird cyclopropene using a synthesis that was multi-step and very low yield. I wish I'd read about this.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I like Nobel Prizes in Chem. They're usually actually important discoveries, as evidenced by the fact that chemists use them constantly two decades after their formulation. The literature-type prizes, I'm still not so sure about.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
<sarcasm style="dripping">
I'm sorry today's omelette wasn't to your taste. Maybe tomorrow they'll talk about Halo and Doom 3 instead! That'd be more interesting, right?
</sarcasm>
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
According to Nobel rules, the prize be be 100% to one person, 50-50% amongst two winners, or 50-25-25% if three. I haven't been able to determine from the news stories which of them gets the 50%... Anyone know? Probably the French guy...
It's interesting that this year the chemistry nobel prize actually goes to chemists this year -- the last two years it went to molecular biologists...
Right, and in 2002 it went to two engineers and a physicist.
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that actually shows what they mean by the Dance of chemicals as they change partners.
Quite nifty, provided you have a flash plug-in.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, according to Alfred Nobel's will and the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prizes are meant to be awarded rather promptly:
Granted, the passage of time is often necessary for the relative importance of a work to become apparent, since bold new ideas tend to be controversial and cannot be appreciated without hindsight.
Well, that's OK. 2004 Peace prize went to the an environmentalist who thinks AIDS is a bio-weapon created by bad western white scientists.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
In the end, the work these people do will mean much more than who put a puck in a net, a ball in a basket, or a jaunty tune in the public's ear.
If mankind has any sort of saviour these days, it's these sort of men: scientists who give us the tools to cure blindness, disease, hunger, and poverty. I'd probably be dead today without technology; the survival rate for near-blind kids was pretty grim just a few centuries ago. Today, thanks to powerful eyeglasses, and later on, laser eye surgury, I've got a normal life.
It's nice to see that these scientists are finally getting some recognition for the great work they do. I wish more scientists got more recognition, everyday, for the contributions to our collective knowledge and future happiness that they quietly make they make on a daily basis, despite a public who is apathetic or hostile to their efforts.
To all the scientists out there on slashdot, thanks, and keep up the good work!
--
AC
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry really ought to go to the doctors who treated Señor Taco after he got the clap from those hookers in Juarez a few weeks ago.
They had to concoct a special formula for him because they had never seen such a bad case of the clap before.
Yeah, the really BIG molecules have cornered the market on sex appeal, it seems. Still, there aren't too many things in science that are more challenging than a total synthesis of a complex natural product ("small" molecules by molecular biology standards) with a dozen or so chiral centers...
"Metathesis can be compared to a dance in which the couples change partners."
This has to be the worst quote I've ever heard describing Grubbs' catalyst. When I woke up this morning and heard that Grubbs had won the Nobel I wondered what the brief description of his work was going to be, and I honestly have to say I was amazingly disappointed with it. However this is part of a larger problem that I've encountered often especially on this webpage, how do you explain complicated subjects to the uninformed masses? How do you explain detailed chemistry to computer geeks? In some cases a pretty simplistic idea is transferred successfully, but this is the exception rather than the rule. IMO, the comments left about the story tend to further complicate the matter.
Having use chemistry developed by Grubbs I'll provide a brief description of his remarkable achievements in the field of organic synthesis (one of the serveral fields Grubbs has impacted [Grubbs is however an organometallic / inorganic chemist]). Organic synthesis is the study of building complext molecules from simple starting materials. The "goal" of organic synthesis is to make compounds with biological activity, e.g. new drugs. Many of the target compounds are initially isolated from nature, chemist then try to replicate them in the lab environment. One of the catalysts Grubbs developed allowed for synthesis of a particularly common structural feature (I'm thinking of cyclic structures, there are more, I know) and it opened whole new doors in terms of synthetic routes that one could take to complete a molecule. It was fairly evident in the mid 90s that his work had a huge impact on the synthetic community and it was apparent he would win the nobel, it was just a matter of time.
What the heck does it matter who it goes to? It's the discovery that counts, not the academic background of the person who made it.
Or don't you consider biochem to be part of chemistry? Because that's a pretty narrow-minded view of chemistry, especially considering how it's the area where the biggest things are happening.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Äntligen!
The thought of it! the prize went to people who didn't have a guild card! The fact that they did top notch science is irrelevant. Someone should have checked their credentials first and leave their important discoveries to be looked at a later stage...
Well, I'm a genomicist myself, and feel I have more in common with biochemists than I do with chemists -- it's not that I don't feel respect for biochemistry -- but to me chenistry is about general principles of chemical reactions, just like physics is about general principles of matter and energy. Of course, things like proteins certainly need to obey physical and chemical laws, but discoveries of how proteins work, as in last year's chemistry nobel, while certainly of great importance, don't really tell us any new basic facts about chemistry itself.
Wow, I thought you were joking, but...
r oversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai#Cont
TFA says that the word "metathesis" comes from the words "meta" and "thesis", so the reader could easily read the word as met.a.THE.sis (long E and emphasis on 3rd syllable); however, the only pronounciation I have ever heard is me.TaTH.e.sis (short a and emphasis on the 2nd syllable). Just FYI.
-- but to me chenistry is about general principles of chemical reactions, just like physics is about general principles of matter and energy.
Well, that's your problem then.. it's a narrow view. By that rationale, you would have very very few Nobel prize winners in either Physics or Chemistry.
E.g. this year's Physics prize doesn't teach us anything new about the "general principles". It's all explainable in terms of Quantum Mechanics and Maxwell's equations. That doesn't mean it's not physics.
Of course, things like proteins certainly need to obey physical and chemical laws, but discoveries of how proteins work, as in last year's chemistry nobel, while certainly of great importance, don't really tell us any new basic facts about chemistry itself.
Neither does this prize. All of chemistry is explainable within the framework of quantum mechanics. It's like complaining that the Physics prize isn't teaching us anything new about QM (or newtonian mechanics for that matter).
Besides which, that's bull. Catalysis is catalysis and it pertains to perhaps the most central part of chemistry there is, namely "How do chemical reactions occur". Why would it be less interesting to chemistry just because an enzyme is doing the catalysis?
In fact, it's just the other way around! Enzyme catalysis is an area which is vastly more complex and vastly less understood than traditional catalysts. Not to mention there is significant cross-over between the areas of metalloorganic catalysts (such as this prize) and enzyme catalysis. Try googling for "biomimetic catalyst".
will do school skillet
Well, sure a genomicist would have more in common with a biochemist than a chemist, just as a biochemist would have more in common with a chemist than an astronomer. There is essentially a continuum of physical and natural sciences, and biochemistry tends to fall in-between. Biochemistry itself is a pretty broad term, covering everything from splicing genes into plasmids and growing vats of bacteria and churning out recombinant proteins, to studying electrical conductivity of DNA molecules. The former is fairly separated from traditional chemistry, and the latter is almost indistinguisable from pure physical chemistry.
:)
You can find biochemistry programs in biology, medical, and chemistry departments - often in the same university. Each tends to cater to a general region on the physical-biological continuum.
Chemistry is a very broad field, as is biochemistry. And you really can't understand metabolism without a good understanding of kinetics and thermodynamics - two very physical subjects. One way of looking at life is just a bunch of catalysts that carefully control the reaction of oxidizing and reducing agents in their enviornment, using the resulting energy to replicate, get around, and generally do useful things like speculating on what life actually is...
Silence, dickhead. Take your pitifully unhumourous XML tags and stick them up your arse.
I just spoke to my chemistry lecturer (University of Otago), after we briefly covered olefin metathesis in our organic course this morning. Apparently he is off to have a meal with Prof Grubbs in Christchurch, who will be giving a talk at Otago on Monday.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock#to_my_fa ther
Congrats to the high-tech family!Lord Percy: After literally an hour's ceaseless searching, I have succeeded in creating gold, pure gold.
Blackadder: Are you sure?
Lord Percy: Yes, my lord. Behold.
Blackadder: Percy... it's green.
Lord Percy: That's right, my lord.
Blackadder: Yes, Percy, I don't want to be pedantic or anything, but the colour of gold is gold. That's why it's *called* gold. What you have discovered, if it has a name, is "green".
Lord Percy: Oh, Edmund, can it be true, that I hold here in my mortal hand a nugget of purest green?
Blackadder: Indeed you do, Percy, except, of course, it's not really a nugget, it's more of a splat.
Lord Percy: Well, yes, a splat today... but tomorrow - who knows, or dares to dream?
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ntz0r!
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