Two decades af­ter dis­cov­er­ing a new way to con­struct mol­e­cules, David MacMil­lan and Ben­jamin List win No­bel Prize

Cat­a­lysts play a vi­tal role in drug de­vel­op­ment, dri­ving com­plex se­quences of chem­i­cal re­ac­tions to break down mol­e­cules or join them to­geth­er. But un­til just a cou­ple of decades ago, on­ly two types of cat­a­lysts were known to sci­en­tists: met­als and en­zymes.

Met­al cat­a­lysts are eas­i­ly de­stroyed by mois­ture, so while it’s sim­ple enough to de­ploy them in a lab, large-scale man­u­fac­tur­ing be­comes a chal­lenge. En­zymes, on the oth­er hand, con­sist of hun­dreds of amino acids, though fre­quent­ly enough, on­ly a few of those are ac­tu­al­ly in­volved in a chem­i­cal re­ac­tion.

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