Richard F Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki share Chemistry Nobel

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to Richard F Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki "for developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives."

The three Nobel Laureates will share the Prize amount of 10 million kroner (about $1.5 million) equally, a Nobel Foundation release said today.

The three have been awarded the Nobel Prize for the development of palladium-catalysed cross coupling. This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals, for example carbon-based molecules as complex as those created by nature itself.

Carbon-based (organic) chemistry is the basis of life and is responsible for numerous fascinating natural phenomena: colour in flowers, snake poison and bacteria killing substances such as penicillin.

"Organic chemistry has allowed man to build on nature's chemistry; making use of carbon's ability to provide a stable skeleton for functional molecules. This has given mankind new medicines and revolutionary materials such as plastics, the Nobel Foundation release said.

"In order to create these complex chemicals, chemists need to be able to join carbon atoms together. However, carbon is stable and carbon atoms do not easily react with one another. The first methods used by chemists to bind carbon atoms together were therefore based upon various techniques for rendering carbon more reactive. Such methods worked when creating simple molecules, but when synthesizing more complex molecules chemists ended up with too many unwanted by-products in their test tubes."