Benjamin List, Briton David MacMillan win Chemistry Nobel Prize for mirror-image molecules
Sakshi Education
Two scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on building molecules that are mirror images of one another.
Benjamin List, Briton David MacMillan win Chemistry Nobel Prize for mirror-image molecules
German-born Benjamin List and Briton David MacMillan (Born in Bellshill, United Kingdom and Professor at Princeton University, USA) were announced today as the winners at an event in Stockholm.
Their chemical toolkit has been used for discovering new drugs and making molecules that can capture light in solar cells. The winners will share the prize money of 10 million Swedish kroner (1,135.54 million US Dollars).
The technique, called asymmetric organocatalysis, has made it much easier to produce asymmetric molecules - chemicals that exist in two versions, where one is a mirror image of the other.
Chemists often just want one of these mirror images - particularly when producing medicines - but it has been difficult to find efficient methods for doing this.
The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel founded the prizes in his will written a year before his death in 1896. A total of 187 individuals have received the chemistry prize since it was first awarded in 1901.
Only seven of these laureates have been women. One person, the British biochemist Frederick Sanger, won the prize twice - in 1958 and 1980.
