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.

Comments

Re:Fuel?

[thc69]

Well, we can already make diesel out of nearly any kind of oil extracted from nearly any biological material...

Re:Fuel?

[suchire]

Not only is this a new method, but it isn't really all that practical for the synthesis of fuels. You can't run this reaction with just substrates and the Grubb's catalyst; you have to have solvents, which cost money. The catalysts have a finite lifetime and turnover, so you also have to replace those. That's not really very cost effective, in the end, compared to simply adapting technologies to use the substrates as fuel directly.

Re:Grubbs is great

[rgmoore]

What is quintuply-bonded carbon? Is this one of those jokes like dihydrogen monoxide?

Nope. Carbon can only form 4 bonds at a time. During the course of a reaction, there may be short-lived meta-stable carbon species with only 3 bonds, or reactive intermediates (i.e. unstable things that are a transition state between two more stable forms) that have 3 bonds plus one bond that's half made and one bond that's half broken, but there aren't any forms with a full 5 bonds. Undergraduates taking their first Organic test, though, are apt to draw such quintuply bonded carbons and thus get answers wrong on their tests.

Prof. Grubbs always warns his students not to make that mistake before their first test, and even goes into a mini-rant on the topic much like the one in the article. I wouldn't be surprised if the "This reaction doesn't have a chance in hell of happening" were a direct quote. The rant is very memorable, and I'm sure that everyone who took Organic from him would remember it. Despite this, many students will go on to make exactly the mistake that he warned them against, which I assume is the reason that he's so vehement about it.