(Inside Science) — Strychnine is a substance commonly deployed to keep rodents away from your kitchen.
But a whole line of Nobel Prize winners -- this year's included -- care little about strychnine's use as rat poison. They are more focused on the strychnine molecule's complex structure.
"The synthesis of this naturally occurring material in the laboratory was viewed as a Mount Everest of chemical synthesis because it was just so hard," said Scott Denmark, a chemist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
David MacMillan and Benjamin List won the 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a precise new tool for molecular construction called organocatalysis. The Nobel Committee noted the method's impact on pharmaceutical research, and in making chemistry greener.
But like other Nobel winners before him, MacMillan turned to strychnine as part of proving the efficiency of his synthesis methods.
Some plants create strychnine naturally. But organic ...
