Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the year 2021 was awarded to Prof. Benjamin List of Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany and Prof. David W.C. MacMillan of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. The award was given for their contribution to developing and popularizing asymmetric organocatalysis as an efficient tool for the construction of organic molecules. Organocatalysis is the use of small organic molecules to catalyze organic reactions, which has gained attention for bringing about asymmetric transformations without the use of metal catalysts. Both Prof. List and Prof. MacMillan pioneered the activation of carbonyl compounds by converting them to iminium ions or enamines using optically active secondary amines as organocatalysis. This article will discuss the contributions of List and MacMillan with brief introductions to the problems they attempted to solve using organocatalysis.