Laureate Biography
Richard Royce Schrock received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Yves Chauvin and Robert Grubbs for transforming a class of chemical reactions from scientific curiosity to one of the most important reactions in organic chemistry. Used to produce everything from pharmaceuticals to plastics, the metathesis reaction involves breaking and restoring bonds between certain carbon atoms, and switching their attached partners during this cut-and-paste process. Schrock built on Chauvin’s detailed outline of how this peculiar reaction works, by discovering the vital facilitators, or catalysts, that allow these reactions to work effectively in the lab.
Schrock was born on 4 January 1945, the youngest of three children, in Berne, Indiana, although the family soon moved to Decatur. He spent his childhood exploring the ponds and woodlands surrounding the family home, fishing, catching frogs and snakes, and ice-skating in the winter. His father, a carpenter, had a small woodworking shop at the back of the house, and taught him how to use his tools. Schrock enjoyed building things, and woodworking became a hobby that still occupies his spare time.
On his eighth birthday his brother Theodore gave him a chemistry set, which sparked his love of chemistry. He built a small laboratory, relying on his woodworking skills for the shelving, and stocked his shelves using money that he earned from a paper round. Schrock moved beyond these simple experiments when, at the age of thirteen, his chemistry teacher provided him with discarded equipment and textbooks. In 1959, the family moved to San Diego, California, where his father had begun construction work a year earlier. There, he was able to buy better equipment and chemicals from the drugstore. He also found a new source of income. Having taken up surfing, he put his woodworking abilities to new use, designing, building and selling fins for surfboards.
After leaving school Schrock turned down an offer from University of California, Berkeley preferring the smaller campus at Riverside, as he felt that its size would allow him to do independent research earlier. His hunch proved to be correct, after completing his first year, he took a summer job researching atmospheric chemistry. Having graduated in 1967, Schrock moved to Harvard University to study for a doctorate. In November 1969, he met Nancy Carlson, a schoolteacher, at a party, and they married two years later, just after he received his doctorate. He then began a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation at the University of Cambridge, UK. There he met Earl Muetterties, who offered him a job at the Central Research Department at the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware.
In 1975, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became professor in 1980 and where he made his Nobel-Prize-awarded breakthrough. Yves Chauvin had revealed in 1971 how a metal catalyst facilitates the cutting and swapping process that occurs during the metathesis reaction, and in doing so he explained a baffling rearrangement process that chemists working in petroleum refining had observed for over a decade. At the time the catalysts available were inefficient and unstable, and Schrock carried out a search for better alternatives, in particular looking at compounds that he had worked on at DuPont in the early 1970s. In 1990, he discovered that switching the metal used in the catalysts to the elements molybdenum and tungsten created more efficient facilitators for the task.
Schrock is still based at MIT, where he has been the Frederick G Keyes Professor of Chemistry since 1989. He has also received the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry in 1996, and he has been the associate editor of Organometallics, a journal of the American Chemical Society.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005
Richard Schrock’s Nobel Lecture
Schrock Group at MIT
Wikipedia: Richard Schrock
