We extend a warm welcome to David MacMillan, who joined our community in May as a distinguished scholar at Ludwig Princeton. David, who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Benjamin List for their independent development of an entirely novel type of chemical catalysis, is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University and founding director of the Princeton Catalysis Initiative. Catalysts had long been thought to fall into one of only two categories: metals and biological enzymes. In 2000, David upended that assumption with the development of asymmetric organocatalysis, in which catalysts are constructed from small organic molecules to which other environmentally benign elements—like oxygen, phosphorus and nitrogen—can be attached for distinct mechanistic purposes. Chemical reactions can generate products that are identical in every way except that they’re mirror images of each other, with each having distinct chemical properties. David’s catalysts could be fashioned to drive asymmetric chemical reactions that generate primarily one of those mirror images. The low cost and ease with which they can be designed to sequentially generate complex, symmetrically biased molecules has made them especially valuable to pharmaceutical manufacturers, as chirality is a key determinant of the biological activity of drug molecules. David is the third prominent scientist to be appointed by the Ludwig Institute’s Board of Directors as a distinguished scholar.
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