This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists for their work on a versatile strategy for synthesizing all manner of novel chemical compounds in an environmentally friendly way.
Yves Chauvin of the French Petroleum Institute in Rueil–Malmaison, Richard R. Schrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert H. Grubbs of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena will share the nearly $1.3 million award.
The three scientists focused on a reaction called metathesis, a Greek term for change in position. During metathesis, molecules that contain carbon-carbon double bonds swap groupings of atoms. Discovered in the 1950s, the mechanism behind these swaps wasn’t understood until 1970, when Chauvin showed that the key is a catalyst with a metal-carbon double bond.