HONORS: John Waugh takes Welch Award, Tobin Marks nabs Dreyfus Prize
WO CHEMISTS received prestigious awards
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last week. For his pioneering work in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, MIT’s John S. Waugh won this year’s Welch Award in Chemistry. And for his wide-ranging contributions to catalysis, Northwestern University’s Tobin J. Marks nabbed the 2011 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. The $300,000 Welch Award is given annually by the Houston-based Welch Foundation. The $250,000 Dreyfus Prize is awarded biennially by the New York City-based Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation. Waugh, 82, is best known for figuring out how NMR—which until the late 1960s was largely restricted to interrogating solutions—could be extended to solids. “He took what was a very useful tool for studying small molecules in solution and greatly expanded its possible applications to a range of solid materials that can’t be studied effectively by any other method,” notes James L. Kinsey of Rice University, who chairs the Welch Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board. Solid-state NMR has since provided a window into the structure of proteins, membranes, viruses, and other large biomolecules. Waugh dipped his toe in the then-nascent field of NMR as a graduate student at Caltech in the 1940s. “The word NMR had not even been invented yet,” Waugh says. Still, he adds, it was “clear that the technique might have chemical applications.” Waugh proved this point by building his own NMR
spectrometer and using it to nail down the then-controversial structure of the bifluoride ion. After landing a faculty job at MIT, Waugh went on to show how to use combinations of external fields to sharpen the NMR spectra of solids, which are typically broad and diffuse. He also developed a theoretical explanation of the strategy, known as average Hamiltonian theory. He later developed a method that dramatically increased NMR’s ability to detect rare nuclei such as carbon-13. Marks, 67, has spent his career developing new industrial catalysts as well as determining their structures and mechanisms. Marks’s efforts to make catalytic processes greener and more efficient are “essential to sustaining our environment,” says Marye Anne Fox of the University of California, San Diego, who chairs the Dreyfus Scientific Affairs Committee. For example, his group has developed lanthanide and actinide catalysts that mediate hydrosilation, hydroalkoxylation, hydroamination, and hydrothiolation reactions. These novel catalysts are also being studied for use in polymerization reactions. The team also focuses on ways of using green solvents, including ionic liquids, as media to carry out these transformations. His group also made bimetallic polymerization catalysts that are more active and selective than standard polymerization catalysts. In some cases, these catalysts were shown to be more than twice as active and three times more selective than standard polymerization catalysts. In addition, Marks has devised ways to anchor group IV metallocene-based catalysts on surfaces to enhance their activity, ease their separation from products, and make their recycling less costly. Typically restricted to solution-phase reactions, these catalysts are used to polymerize olefins and hydrogenate benzene.—MITCH
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WAUGH, MARKS WIN BIG PRIZES
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INDUSTRIAL BIOTECH DSM, Roquette plan Europe’s first commercial biosuccinic acid plant DSM and Roquette plan to build what they say will be Europe’s first commercial-scale plant to make succinic acid from biobased raw materials such as corn sugar. The 10,000-metric-tonper-year facility is expected to open at Roquette’s Cassano Spinola, Italy, site in the second half of 2012. The new plant is the latest development in the emerging market for the four-carbon organic acid. Today, succinic acid is a small-volume chemical mostly synthesized from maleic anhydride. But DSM and Roquette say the biobased version has the potential to be a 2 millionton-per-year ingredient that replaces petroleum-derived chemicals.
The two European firms first teamed up in 2007 to build a demonstration succinic acid plant in Lestrem, France. Last year, they announced the formation of a joint venture that will be called Reverdia once it wins regulatory approval. Their venture is one of several contenders in the nascent business. Late last year, Myriant Technologies announced plans to build a 15,000-ton succinic acid plant in Louisiana by 2012 with the help of $50 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding. At the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s industrial biotechnology conference in Toronto last week, Jean-François
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Huc, CEO of BioAmber, stated his firm’s intention to produce succinic acid in North America by 2013 and in Thailand through its cooperation with Mitsubishi Chemical by 2015. BioAmber currently makes biobased succinic acid at a 3,000ton demonstration facility in Pomacle, France. Will van den Tweel, general manager of Reverdia, told conference attendees that DSM’s low-pH yeast fermentation process eliminates the salt created in the competing bacteria-based routes. Huc acknowledged the benefits of yeast and noted that BioAmber’s new facilities will deploy yeast licensed from Cargill.—MICHAEL MCCOY
