David W.C. MacMillan

David W.C. MacMillan (born 1968, Bellshill, Scotland) is a Scottish-American organic chemist who developed asymmetric organocatalysis, in which a small, organic, carbon-based molecule is used as a catalyst to drive the production of a specific enantiomer (one form of a molecule that has two possible forms as mirror images of one another). The development of organocatalysis dispelled the notion that only metals and enzymes can serve as catalysts for chemical reactions and enabled the rapid construction of new drugs and materials. Moreover, organocatalysts are biodegradable, safer, and less costly than traditional catalysts; hence, their development greatly reduced the impact of chemistry on the environment. MacMillan was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his breakthrough; he shared the prize with German chemist Benjamin List.

MacMillan studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow. In 1990, after earning a bachelor’s degree, he went to the United States, where he carried out his doctoral studies at the University of California, Irvine. In 1996, having earned a Ph.D., he took a postdoctoral position at Harvard University. There his research focused on enantioselective catalysis, in which a specific enantiomer of a chiral product is generated from achiral reactants. In 1998 MacMillan joined the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

At Berkeley MacMillan’s research centred on the development of novel reactions and enantioselective synthesis. In 2000 he reported his first major breakthrough, the first enantioselective organocatalytic Diels-Alder reaction, in which a small organic molecule, rather than a metal, was used to drive the production of a specific enantiomer. At the time, in need of a word to describe the process, he coined the term organocatalysis. Earlier that year List independently reported that the amino acid proline is an efficient catalyst and can drive asymmetric catalysis. Both researchers subsequently developed other inexpensive stable organocatalysts that could be used for many different types of chemical reactions.

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The same year that his groundbreaking paper was published, MacMillan moved his laboratory to the California Institute of Technology, where he served as a professor of chemistry. In 2006 he accepted a professorship at Princeton University, where he continued his investigations of novel methodologies for the total synthesis of compounds, particularly pharmaceuticals, where applications for organocatalysis were widespread.

MacMillan was recognized with various honours, in addition to the Nobel Prize, throughout his career. In particular, he was a recipient of the Ernst Schering Prize (2015) and the Ryoji Noyori Prize (2017). He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society (2012) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2018).