Nobel winners are setting world alight

It’s Nobel Prize season again, the time of year when the scientific achievements that have led to major changes in our understanding of the world around us or have made enormous impacts in science and society, are honoured.

Since I am a chemist by trade, I’ll start with the prize for chemistry. This year, the prize was jointly awarded to three chemists, Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, for the development of palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions.

So, what does this mean to you and me? The aim of the synthetic organic chemist is to put together molecules that are useful, for example new pharmaceuticals. They do this using a vast palette of available chemical reactions to build up target molecules from simpler precursor molecules.

These molecules have a skeleton of carbon atoms that hold their molecular structures together and so chemical reactions that form bonds between carbon atoms are vitally important for the building of new molecules.

Heck, Negishi and Suzuki’s contribution centred on the development of catalysts based on the metallic element palladium.

These act to facilitate the formation of these carbon-carbon bonds between simpler smaller molecules to produce larger molecules and do so with great efficiency and selectivity. The reactions that bare the names of these three men are now widespread and are used on a daily basis in chemical laboratories around the world and in the manufacture of drugs and medicines.

For medicine and physiology, as reported last week in the Chronicle, the Nobel Prize comes to the UK, awarded to Robert Edwards for the development of in vitro fertilisation, or IVF. Since the birth of the first so-called test tube baby, Oldham’s Louise Brown, in 1978, a staggering 4 million people have been born using IVF who otherwise would never have had the chance to live at all. While IVF has caused much controversy over the years, the impact of the work and the happiness that it has brought millions of families world-wide is undeniable.

This year’s prize for physics is awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester.

Their prize is in recognition of their work for the development of new routes for the preparation and isolation of a material called graphene and the characterisation of its electrical properties. The material is related to graphite, the “lead” in your common every day pencil.

Graphite is a form of the element carbon in which sheets of interlocking hexagonal rings made up of carbon atoms stack up one on top of the other.

Geim and Novoselov cracked the problem of isolating single sheets of graphite that are only one atom thick called graphene. Their measurements of the electrical properties of these ultra-thin sheets showed that graphene is as good a conductor of electricity as copper and so graphene has potential applications in making nano-electronic materials and ultrafast transistors. It also has other diverse potential applications such as in touch-screen technologies and as membranes that can be used for DNA sequencing.

The material is also extremely strong. If a hammock were made of a single, one-atom-thick graphene sheet it would hold a 4kg cat without breaking while only weighing the same as a single one of the cat’s whiskers.

An interesting aside to this year’s Nobel Prizes is that Giem is also a previous winner of an Ig Nobel prize.

These prizes are more light-hearted tongue-in-cheek awards for “improbable scientific research” that “first makes you smile, and then makes you think”. Ten years ago, Giem won an Ig Nobel for using an extremely strong magnetic field to levitate a live frog.

This year’s Ig Nobel prize awards go to such advances as the discovery that asthma symptoms can be treated with a rollercoaster ride, the use of slime mould to determine the optimum route for train tracks, the demonstration that wearing socks on the outside of your shoes reduces the chance of slipping on icy pavements, confirmation of the widely held belief that swearing helps relieve pain, the mathematical demonstration that organisations would be more efficient if they promoted people at random and the documentation of the sexual habits of fruit bats.

The one that stands out for me however is the ingenious development of a radio-controlled helicopter as an in-situ collector for whale snot.


Dr PAUL ELLIOTT is a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Huddersfield