Carbon's noble matchmaker makes Nobel

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistrywas awarded jointly to Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Newark, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo, Japan, for their pioneering work on palladium-catalysed cross-couplings in organic synthesis. This seemingly innocuous phrase belies the power of a process that allows chemists to join carbon atom to carbon atom and to quickly build complex organic molecules.