Nobel Prize Chemistry 2010 Winners

Three chemists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2010. An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing chemical methods widely used to make potential cancer drugs and other medicines, as well as slimmed-down computer screens.

Trio wins chemistry Nobel for key chemical tool

Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were honored for their development four decades ago of one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, called palladium-catalyzed cross couplings.

It lets chemists join carbon atoms together, a key step in the process of building complex molecules. Their methods are now used worldwide in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

The methods developed by the three scientists have been used to artificially produce cancer-killing substances first found in marine sponges, the academy said in its citation. It’s not yet clear whether they will turn out to be useful drugs.

They are also being used to create new antibiotics that work on resistant bacteria and a number of commercially available drugs, including the anti-inflammatory Naproxen, prize committee member Claes Gustafsson said.