Three chemists, including one from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, will share this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, based on their work to develop molecular machines, or nanotechnology, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced.
Sir J Fraser Stoddart, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern, was responsible for the second step in a chain of events that started in the early 1980s. The second wave of nanotechnology, which includes devices and machines that operate on a molecular scale of nanometers, was foreseen by physicist Richard P Feynman, who referred to it in one of his last lectures in 1984.
Other winners were Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France and Bernard L Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Dr Feringa was the first to take the tiny machines, made up of just a few molecules, and add energy to the system in order to turn those molecules into a motor that could do work. His tiny machine was a rotor that, given the input of energy, could spin continuously in the same direction. He did much of that work prior to 1999.
But before motors could be made from the molecules, Dr Stoddart developed a “rotaxane” by threading a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrating that the ring was able to move along the axle, as in the molecule-sized elevator illustrated above.
Dr Sauvage was responsible for first joining molecules to each other by “mechanical” bonds, rather than the covalent chemical bonds that usually join atoms into molecules.
Among Dr Stoddart’s developments based on rotaxanes are a molecular lift, a molecular muscle, and a molecule-based computer chip, as his work showed that
Dr Stoddart, 74, has a distinguished career in science that started with a bachelor’s degree from Edinburgh University in his native Scotland in 1964. He was also one of about 20 research scientists to be invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to participate in the Nobel Jubilee Symposium on “Frontiers of Molecular Sciences” in Stockholm, Sweden, in December 2001. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2007 while he was working at the University of California, Los Angeles and added Knight Bachelor to his list of honors, that includes a range of honorary doctorates from US and other universities.
