What is Soil pH and Why is it important in farming? - Chemosmart

               All of you know that, the Nobel Prize is considered the most prestigious award in the world in its field. It is awarded to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. Every year in early October, the Nobel laureates are announced. 

            The year 2020, however was an exception to the rule. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the laureates received their Nobel prize diplomas and medals in their countries of residence. 

Recent Nobel Chemistry Prize winners

2020	Emmanuelle Charpentier (France) and Jennifer Doudna (US), for developing the gene-editing technique known as the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipping
2019	John Goodenough (US), Stanley Whittingham (Britain) and Akira Yoshino (Japan) for the development of lithium-ion batteries, paving the way for smartphones and a fossil fuel-free society.
2018	Frances H. Arnold (US), George P. Smith (US) and Sir Gregory P. Winter (Britain) for developing enzymes used for greener and safer chemistry and antibody drugs with fewer side effects.
2017	Jacques Dubochet (Switzerland), Joachim Frank (US) and Richard Henderson (Britain), for cryo-electron microscopy, a method for imaging tiny, frozen molecules.
2016	Jean-Pierre Sauvage (France), Fraser Stoddart (Britain) and Bernard Feringa (The Netherlands) for developing molecular machines, the world's smallest machines.
2015	Tomas Lindahl (Sweden), Paul Modrich (US) and Aziz Sancar (Turkey-US) for work on how cells repair damaged DNA.
2014	Eric Betzig (US), William Moerner (US) and Stefan Hell (Germany) for the development of super-high-resolution fluorescence microscopy.
2013	Martin Karplus (US-Austria), Michael Levitt (US-Britain) and Arieh Warshel (US-Israel) for devising computer models to simulate chemical processes.
2012	Robert Lefkowitz (US) and Brian Kobilka (US) for studies of G-protein-coupled cell receptors.
2011	Daniel Shechtman (Israel) for the discovery of quasicrystals.

         The 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry department was awarded to Two German scientists. The names of this two scientists are Benjamin List and Scotland-born scientist David WC MacMillan for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis. Their work on asymmetric organocatalysis, which the award-giving described as ' a new and ingenious tool for molecule building'. 

              The winners were announced Wednesday by Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Nobel panel said list and MacMillan in 2000 independently developed a new of catalysis. 

             Catalysts are fundamental tools for chemists, but researchers long believed that there were, in principle, just 2 types of catalysts available which are metal and enzymes. Benjamin List and David MacMillan developed a third type of catalysis i.e. asymmetric organocatalysis. And hence this two scientists are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021. 

Benjamin List:

       Benjamin list, born 1968 in Frankfurt, Germany. Ph.D in 1997 from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.

 
David W.C. MacMillan:

             David WC MacMillan, born 1968 in Bellshill, U.K. Ph.D 1996 from university of California, Irvine. 

            A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of chemical reactions without taking part in the reactions or without undergoing any changes during the chemical reactions. They are Molecules that remain stable while enabling or speeding up chemical reactions performed in labs or large industrial reactors. 

        Before asymmetric Catalysis, man-made catalyzed substances would often contain nit only the desired molecule but also it's unwanted mirror image. The sedative thalidomide, which caused Deformities in human embryos around six decades ago, was a catastrophic example.