AsianScientist (Jun. 12, 2012) – Chemistry Nobel Prize winners Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were honored by the Royal Society of Chemistry at a ceremony in Edinburgh today.
Professor Lesley Yellowlees, the President-Elect of the RSC, presented the Japanese scientists with their RSC Honorary Fellowships on the first day of the society’s International Symposium on Advancing the Chemical Sciences.
“It is not every day you get to meet Nobel Prize winners so it gives me great pleasure to be able to present Professors Akira Suzuki and Ei-ichi Negishi with their Honorary Fellowship on behalf of the Royal Society of Chemistry,” said Prof. Yellowlees.
Professor Negishi is best known for his discovery of the ‘Negishi coupling’ – a cross coupling reaction in organic chemistry involving an organozinc compound, an organic halide and a nickel or palladium catalyst creating a new carbon-carbon covalent bond.
Professor Suzuki also has a reaction named after him: the ‘Suzuki reaction’ couples boronic acids (containing an organic substituent) to halides.
The professors were jointly awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with U.S. scientist Richard F. Heck for the discovery and development of their palladium-catalyzed cross couplings. This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals.
The professors will be giving a public lecture tomorrow in the Chemistry Center at Burlington House, Piccadilly, discussing the work that led them to achieve the Nobel Prize in 2010.
They then travel to Cardiff on Friday for a special one-day symposium to celebrate the contribution that organic chemistry makes to society and to mark the career of Professor Keith Smith, a RSC council member who will retire later this year from Cardiff University.
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Source: RSC.
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