In recent years, many chemists have grumbled that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to people they’ve never heard of, for work that looks more like biology.

This year’s prize should please them, as it rewards some good old-fashioned organic chemistry.

The award has gone to Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Newark; Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University, Indiana; and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, “”https://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2010/press.html">for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis".

Organic chemistry – the study and synthesis of carbon-based molecules – has a vast tool-box of reactions at its disposal, and cross-couplings are some of the most versatile.

These reactions allow chemists to stitch molecules together into the complex structures that make up pharmaceuticals, pesticides and the like. The palladium catalysts developed by the three chemists honoured today mean that normally recalcitrant carbon atoms can be connected quickly, efficiently, and with few of the unwanted by-products that can all too often turn chemists’ reactions into useless brown sludge.