Carbon's noble matchmaker makes Nobel

By David Bradley2011-01-01T00:00:00

Source: Phillip Broadwith/Chemistry World

Negishi, Suzuki and Heck were honoured for their pioneering work on palladium catalysis, David Bradley reports

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.

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