PCT Portraits: Meet the Innovators

Nobel Prize for a dance which creates new molecules

To describe Yves Chauvin as a modest man would seem an understatement. After hearing that he was to share the 2005 Nobel Prize for chemistry with U.S. scientists Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock, the 74 year old Frenchman declared himself "embarrassed" by his sudden fame, adding, "I don't have anything much to tell." Former colleagues at the French Institute for Petroleum (IFP) recount how, indifferent to status, he would turn down more senior posts in order to pursue his research, remaining in the same office for more than 40 years.

As Yves Chauvin recalls, it was on a rainy Sunday afternoon back in 1971 that he thought: "Ah yes, it's obvious!" and so made his quiet breakthrough in an area of organic chemical synthesis known as metathesis. These chemical reactions are now widely used in industry in the production of pharmaceuticals, polymers and advanced plastics, for example, and are the only means of producing certain useful substances. But some 20 years were to pass before Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock made it possible to walk through the door that Yves Chauvin's new "mechanism" had opened and unleash the potential.

Metathesis means 'exchange places.' It refers to a process in which the bonds between different pairs of carbon atoms are broken and new bonds formed, so creating new substances. (It can be thought of as a dance, during which the couples change partners and dance off as new couples). The critical advances made by the Nobel Prize laureates enabled the development of efficient catalysts to trigger these reactions. The new catalysts marked a great step forward for "green" chemistry. They enable industry to conduct reactions at lower temperatures, produce less hazardous waste and save energy.

Researchers are now using metathesis in the quest for new pharmaceuticals to fight diseases including cancer, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer's disease and Down's syndrome. In the words of the Nobel Prize citation: "Imagination will soon be the only limit to what molecules can be built."

Yves Chauvet, Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock have all used the PCT system to disclose and protect their scientific advances.

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