American Richard Heck and Japanese researchers Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for developing a chemical method that has allowed scientists to make medicines and better electronics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award honors the trio’s development of palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic systems. It called that one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, and one that is used by researchers worldwide and in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics.
Heck, 79, is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware.
PHOTO: AFP/SCANPIX
Negishi, 75, is a chemistry professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and 80-year-old Suzuki is a professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
Negishi told reporters in Stockholm by telephone that he was asleep when the call came.
“I went to bed last night well past midnight so I was sleeping but I am extremely happy to receive the telephone call,” he said.
“This means a lot. I would be telling a lie if I wasn’t thinking about this. I told someone that I began thinking — dreaming — about this prize half a century ago,” he said.
Officials at Hokkaido University were delighted by the news, said spokesman Hidetoshi Nakatsuka.
“Professor Suzuki has been mentioned as a candidate in the past few years and we’ve been waiting for this to happen for all these years,” Nakatsuka said. “We were standing by and we are extremely delighted.”
The method has been used to artificially produce discodermolide, a cancer-killing substance first found in marine sponges, the academy said in its citation. It added that no cancer drug based on the substance has been developed yet.
“Only the future will tell if discodermolide turns out to be a life-saving drug,” it said.
Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday called for the government to stem the brain drain of scientists after two Russian-born physicists won the Nobel prize in physics.
“We need to make an effort so that our talented people do not go abroad,” Medvedev said, the Interfax news agency reported.
Medvedev said that his joy at the Nobel win was dampened when he realized that both men now work at the University of Manchester.
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who shared the physics prize, graduated from the Moscow Physics and Technology University and conducted research in the Moscow region. Geim left Russia in the early 1990s and is now a Dutch national while Novoselov, 36, holds a British passport.
Geim also won one of the 2000 Ig Nobel prizes for the discovery that apparently non-magnetic substances can be levitated in a magnetic field — proved in 1997 by making a frog seemingly float in the air.
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