Nobel Prize

17 October 1990 has decided to award the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professor Elias James Corey, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis. Prize for masterly development of organic synthesis The development of the art of organic synthesis during little over a hundred years…

Products such as plastics, synthetic fibres, paints and pigments, pharmaceuticals and pesticides and many others have become readily available through the dynamic development of organic synthesis (the science of building organic molecules).     There are many ways to build a complex molecule from simple starting materials but to find the simplest way is often difficult. It…

My birth in July 1928 in Methuen, Massachusetts was followed just eighteen months later by the death of my father, Elias, a successful business man in that community 30 miles north of Boston. My mother, Fatina (née Hasham), changed my name from William to Elias shortly after my father’s passing. I do not remember my…

Contents: Based on materials from the 1990 Nobel Poster for Chemistry.

Many organic molecules are three-dimensional and can exist in two mirror image forms, one left handed and one right handed. A synthesis gives, in general, equal amounts of the two mirror image forms of the molecule. These might have completely different biological activity. Natural products, i.e. chemicals found in Nature, are usually either “left- or…

The history of organic synthesis starts with the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler who, in 1828, succeeded to make urea from simple materials. This was the first time when organic (=living) matter was produced from inorganic (=dead) matter. This was not believed to be possible, at the time.      By the end of the nineteenth century…

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The achievements awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry demonstrate how the secret to constructing synthetic versions of chemicals from scratch is to work backwards. Elias Corey developed and refined a novel, reverse approach to synthesizing organic compounds – that is, compounds that contain carbon atoms – and in the process he transformed this discipline…

  Editors: Solgerd Björn-Rasmussen and Margareta Wiberg Roland, Information Department, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Author: Dr Olof Wennerström, Department of Organic Chemistry, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden Illustrator: Karin Feltzin, Stockholm, Sweden Printed by: Tryckindustri AB, Solna 1990 Copyright © , Information Department, Box 50005, S-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden, Tel. +46-8-673 95…