2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Benjamin List, David WC MacMillan

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.”

“The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis,” tweeted the award-giving organisation.

Asymmetric organocatalysis is a “new and ingenious tool for molecule building”.

“Organic catalysts can be used to drive multitudes of chemical reactions. Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

It said these catalysts were both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.

In 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna won it “for the development of a method for genome editing.”

The chemistry award is the third of this year’s crop of Nobel prizes and follows the prizes for medicine or physiology, and physics, announced earlier this week.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 113 times to 188 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021. Frederick Sanger is the only laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 and 1980.