David MacMillan, who earned his doctorate from UC Irvine and served as a scientist as Pasadena’s Caltech, is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, an honor he shares with Benjamin List, a former student and assistant professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, it was announced Wednesday, Oct. 6.
MacMillan and List were awarded the Nobel Prize for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction called organocatalysis. The pair’s work has allowed scientists to to make a variety of compounds, including medicines and pesticides more cheaply, efficiently, safely and with significantly less hazardous waste.
“It’s already benefiting humankind greatly,” said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel panel.
“This concept for catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we didn’t think of it earlier,” Johan Aqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in the release.
MacMillan, born in Bellshill, United Kingdom, in 1968, is a professor at Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. from UC Irvine in 1996 and was a scientist at UC Berkeley and Caltech in Pasadena. MacMillan was advised through the course of his graduate studies at UCI by Larry Overman, Distinguished Professor emeritus of chemistry.
Overman said in a statement on the UCI’s website he believes this year’s Chemistry Prize to List and MacMillan will be broadly welcomed by the chemistry community because the organocatalytic chemical synthesis methods developed by David MacMillan are used every day around the world in the discovery and development of new medicines.
“What sets Dave apart is his remarkable creativity and vision,” Overman said. “These attributes, together with his delightful personality were apparent early in his graduate studies at UCI.”
List was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1968 and is the director of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Kohlenforschung in Germany.
It was the second day in a row that a Nobel rewarded work that had environmental implications. The physics prize honored developments that expanded our understanding of climate change, just weeks before the start of global climate negotiations in Scotland.
The chemistry prize focused on the making of molecules. That requires linking atoms together in specific arrangements, an often difficult and slow task. Until the beginning of the millennium, chemists had only two methods — or catalysts — to speed up the process, using either complicated enzymes or metal catalysts.
That all changed when the pair independently reported that small organic molecules can be used to do the job. The new tools have been important for developing medicines and minimizing drug manufacturing glitches, including problems that can cause harmful side effects.
Åqvist called the method as “simple as it is ingenious.”
“The fact is that many people have wondered why we didn’t think of it earlier,” he added.
MacMillan said that winning the prize left him “stunned, shocked, happy, very proud.”
“I grew up in Scotland, a working-class kid. My dad’s a steelworker. My mom was a home help. … I was lucky enough to get a chance to come to America, to do my Ph.D.,” he said.
In fact, he said at a news conference in Princeton, he was planning to follow his older brother into physics, but the physics classes in college were at 8 a.m. in a cold and leaky classroom in rainy Scotland, while the chemistry courses were two hours later in warmer, drier spaces. As he told that story, he said he could hear his wife pleading with him not to share it.
His said the inspiration for his Nobel-winning work came when thinking about the dirty process of making chemicals — one that requires precautions he likened to those taken at nuclear power plants.
If he could devise a way of making medicines faster by completely different means that didn’t require vats of metal catalysts, the process would be safer for both workers and the planet, he reasoned.
List said he did not initially know MacMillan was working on the same subject and figured his own hunch might just be a “stupid idea” — until it worked. At that eureka moment, “I did feel that this could be something big,” the 53-year-old said.
H.N. Cheng, president of the American Chemical Society, said the laureates developed “new magic wands.”
Before the their work, “the standard catalysts frequently used were metals, which frequently have environmental downsides,” Cheng said. “They accumulate, they leach, they may be hazardous.”
The catalysts that MacMillan and List pioneered “are organic, so they will degrade faster, and they are also cheaper,” he said.
The Nobel panel noted that their contributions made the production of key drugs easier, including an antiviral and an anti-anxiety medication.
“Dave and Ben have really invented a totally new approach to organic chemistry that has proven to be very powerful and very useful,” former colleague Dennis Dougherty said in an interview Wednesday, “because it enables others to make molecules that we couldn’t make before or make other ones much more efficiently.”
Comparing the Nobel winners’ work as an expansion to a vital scientific “toolkit,” Dougherty — current chair of the Pasadena-based California Institute of Technology’s division of chemistry and chemical engineering — noted that scientists don’t focus on winning prizes.
“You work toward doing good science, important science,” he added, 12 hours after he emailed his close friend at 3:30 a.m. to say congratulations. “And that’s what Dave did. We are proud that he’s been recognized.”
Peter Somfai, another member of the committee, stressed the importance of the discovery for the world economy.
“It has been estimated that catalysis is responsible for about 35% of the world’s GDP, which is a pretty impressive figure,” he said. “If we have a more environmentally friendly alternative, it’s expected that that will make a difference.”
The Nobel comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor,, or more than $1.14 million. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
Over the coming days, Nobels will be awarded in literature, peace and economics.
Staff writer Brennon Dixson, the Associated Press and City News Service contributed to this report.
