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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.
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.
Well, we can already make diesel out of nearly any kind of oil extracted from nearly any biological material...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
That's what Yves Chauvin is.
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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?"
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!
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.
Such irE
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.
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...
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.
"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.