3 Scientists Share Nobel Prize for Creating Key Tool in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded this morning, like the physics prize yesterday, for pioneering work with carbon. The three organic chemists who won the chemistry prize — Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki — were honored for developing new, more efficient ways of linking together carbon atoms, which ordinarily are not readily reactive, to build more complex molecules. The prize, worth about $1.5-million, will be shared equally by Mr. Heck, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware; Mr. Negishi, 75, a professor at Purdue University; and Mr. Suzuki, 80, a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University, in Japan. The three men are being recognized for their development of palladium-catalyzed cross coupling, a technique that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences hailed as allowing scientists to create chemicals “as complex as those created by nature itself,” including those useful in making new medicines and electronic components. In addition to the physics prize, a Nobel Prize was awarded on Monday to a a researcher who helped develop in vitro fertilization.