List, Benjamin

Benjamin List, (born January 11, 1968, Frankfurt am Main, West Germany [now in Germany]), German chemist who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on asymmetric organocatalysis. He shared the prize with British chemist David MacMillan.

List received a degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin in 1993 and a doctorate in the same subject from the Goethe University of Frankfurt in 1997. That year he started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He became an assistant professor there in 1998. He returned to Germany in 2003 to become a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, and in 2005 he became director of the institute.

During List’s time at Scripps, he was researching catalytic antibodies, which are antibodies that, instead of fighting off infection, are used to drive chemical reactions (that is, act as a catalyst). List considered that enzymes also drive chemical reactions but were not metals as other catalysts were and that only a few amino acids in an enzyme would be involved in the chemical reaction. In 2000 he and his colleagues published work describing how they used one amino acid, proline, to drive an aldol reaction (a reaction in which a bond is formed between two carbon atoms) between acetone and several aromatic aldehydes. (MacMillan and his colleagues were doing similar work independently at the same time.)

Since 2000, asymmetric organocatalysis has been a key part of pharmaceutical research and production. The methods pioneered by List and MacMillan have allowed synthesis of important molecules without the intensive use of environmentally damaging heavy metals. In the case of molecules that have two forms, one being the mirror image of the other but sometimes having undesirable effects, asymmetric organocatalysis can be used to produce the preferred form, whereas previous methods of synthesis would produce both.