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Photo credit: Holger Motzkau — File:Richard F. Heck2010.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Richard F. Heck

1931–2015 · United States · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 2010

American chemist whose palladium-catalysed cross-coupling laid the groundwork for the carbon–carbon bond-forming reactions used throughout synthesis today.

Nobel Prize work

Heck developed the palladium-catalysed coupling of aryl or vinyl halides with alkenes — the Heck reaction — which forges carbon–carbon bonds with precision that classical methods could not achieve. His systematic study of the mechanism made palladium catalysis the workhorse of modern organic synthesis.

Fields

Organic chemistry

Related topics

Homogeneous catalysis (Ziegler–Natta, Grubbs)

A homogeneous catalyst moves through a closed sequence of elementary steps in the same phase as the substrate. Small changes in ligands, oxidation state or vacant sites can redirect an entire cycle and change selectivity.

Retrosynthetic analysis

Retrosynthesis plans a synthesis backward from a target by identifying strategic bond disconnections and mapping the resulting synthons to real reagents.

Chemists in the same field

Akira Suzuki (1930)Yves Chauvin (1930)Elias James Corey (1928)Osamu Shimomura (1928)George A. Olah (1927)Ei-ichi Negishi (1935)