2021 | Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Benjamin Lister was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1968 and currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Germany.

David McMillan was born in the United Kingdom in 1968 and currently works at Princeton University in the United States.

Benjamin Lister's most famous system is the proline small molecule catalysis inspired by enzyme catalysis. Utilizing the chiral groups of natural amino acids, he achieved the asymmetric synthesis of numerous small organic molecules.

David Macmillan's contribution is the MacMillan organocatalyst, also derived from natural amino acids, which produces chiral imidazolinone compounds. It utilizes the combination of secondary amines with substrates to form highly electrophilic imine intermediates, achieving asymmetric synthesis.

You may never have heard of their direct contributions, but the materials and drugs synthesized using their methods might be right next door!

• 2020 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their contributions "to the development of methods for genome editing."
• 2019 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino for their contributions to the development of lithium-ion batteries.
• 2018 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Frances H. Arnold (USA), George P. Smith (USA), and Gregory P. Winter (UK) for their contributions to the directed evolution of enzymes and phage display of peptides and antibodies.
• 2017 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson for their development of cryo-electron microscopy for high-resolution structural determination of biomolecules in solution.
• 2016 In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to French scientist Jean-Pierre Sauvage, American scientist J. Fraser Stoddart, and Dutch scientist Bernard L. Feringa for "the design and synthesis of molecular machines."