The day they explained enantiomers, David MacMillan (Bellshill, United Kingdom, 55 years old) did not go to class. He was watching Scotland-Cyprus football. His professor at the University of Glasgow told him off because enantiomers are important. “I didn’t know,” says MacMillan, who is a self-proclaimed soccer fan. In 2021, the now professor at Princeton University (USA) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis, an ingenious and selective way of building this type of molecules, identical, but symmetrical, as if they were reflected in a mirror.
Until just over 20 years ago, in the production of drugs or chemical products for industry, metals or enzymes, proteins such as those that allow us to digest, were used as catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions. But metals can be contaminants and enzymes too complex. Furthermore, many of the processes generated pairs of mirror molecules of which only one of the two was useful. Although they seem almost the same, their effect on the body can have very different effects. Thalidomide is a dramatic example of these differences. One of the enantiomers relieved nausea in pregnant women, but the other, produced as an inseparable byproduct, generated deformations in babies.
MacMillan and List developed new methods to achieve the reactions caused by enzymes, using only a small part of those large proteins that are involved in catalysis. MacMillan discovered many organic catalysts capable of producing only the desired enantiomer, without generating the undesired symmetrical molecule. Asymmetric organocatalysis has since become a way to make chemistry less dangerous and more sustainable.
In an interview conducted at the headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences, in Madrid, which has brought MacMillan to Spain together with the Ramón Areces Foundation, the researcher highlights the importance of the Scottish public education system as the basis for the scientific success of that country, which with only five million inhabitants has more Nobel Prizes than Spain: 16 in total (two from Peace). To improve the numbers, he recommends investing in education, although “the change will come, perhaps, in 20 years.”
Ask. The idea for which you were awarded the Nobel Prize seemed simple, and perhaps someone should have had it before, but that didn’t happen until it occurred to you.
Answer. We did something that seemed very simple, but no one had thought of it before. I thought, if it’s so simple, why hasn’t anyone seen it? But I think this happens a lot in all parts of society. We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase [bromea]. Many times the simplest solutions are in front of us, but we don’t see them. We have to take a step back and think about why we are doing what we are doing. And suddenly you see it, and that’s the fun part of all this. See that science is going in one direction, but there are others that have not been taken and are valuable and simple.
We think that science is absolute and perfect, but there are a lot of things waiting to be discovered
This happens because we are human. We think that science is absolute and perfect, but we are humans doing science and there are a lot of things waiting to be discovered. When you’re on the frontier of science, one of the best things is realizing how much there is to discover. It’s very exciting. Like when you bring an 18-year-old student to the laboratory and you ask them to make a molecule, and you tell them: no one in the universe has made this molecule before, you are the first person.
Q. To make great discoveries, you have to know a lot to control what is known about a field, but also have a certain naivety to think differently. How is that combination achieved?
R. The most dangerous thing is to know a little, because when you know a little you think you know everything. The more you learn, the more you realize how much we don’t know, which is huge. And then there is a second part. Naivety is very good, perhaps the most important thing. The Beatles, McCartney and Lennon invented new guitar chords that no one had heard. When they were asked how they had done it, they replied that they did not know that they were strangers. Sometimes not knowing things is very powerful, because you don’t think about how something shouldn’t work.
Many times, I give a project to a completely new student in my group because they haven’t developed that idea that something shouldn’t work. Once someone believes that something is not going to work, it is very difficult for them to find the motivation, determination and creativity to make it work.
Q. Has winning the Nobel taken away some of that naivety? Is it a prize that makes it difficult to make new discoveries?
R. Not a very good part [de ganar el premio] It’s just that you’re human, and you adjust a little. I always tell my students that the first person you have to impress is yourself. And when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to sleep happy, so you lose a little of that need to be impressed and you have to work to get it back. But at the same time, when you win the Nobel, people decide that you are much smarter than you are. The benefit of that is that when you talk to people in government, to politicians, you can explain to them why things are important and they are much more likely to listen to you.
A not-so-good part of winning the Nobel is that you get a little comfortable
Q. Scientific progress has made it increasingly difficult to understand some of what is happening at the frontier of knowledge, and that complexity is likely to make people distrust science. Can something be done so that society does not perceive science as something esoteric and that can be scary?
R. It is interesting that all the people who are skeptical of science comment on it and create opinions about it on social networks and mobile phones. They are using science to complain about science. They forget that everything around them is based on science. But I think it’s true; Because it’s getting more complicated, it’s getting further and further away from what people can understand, and once people don’t understand, it’s harder for them to accept. It is easy to explain the science of boiling water in the pot, because you can see it, you feel it, but if someone tells you about quantum computers, it is something else.
The problem we face is not that science is becoming more complex, it is that scientists are not good enough to explain what we are doing to society, why we do it and why it is important. We have lost the ability to communicate, even between scientists from different fields, because they are almost like different languages. It’s a problem. If we don’t spend time thinking about how to communicate to people, we lose everyone.
Scientists are not good enough to explain the science we are doing
Q. Do you think that a big problem like climate change can be solved thanks to science, even if we are not able to change our way of life to reduce emissions?
R. Yes, I am a born optimist. I always think there are solutions. There is a problem in my laboratory, which we tried to solve for 17 years, and one day the light came on and we solved it. I believe in science, and in the end it will provide solutions to climate change. I know there are scientists who will disagree and who will say that it is dangerous to say that science will solve it, because it will reduce the motivation for people to care. We can solve it, but we have to be very concerned about the problem, because if not, we won’t solve it fast enough. But I think we’ll figure it out, humans are amazing at finding solutions. The thing is that sometimes it takes us a while to see that solution, and it usually comes from where it is not obvious and is based on something we are not thinking about right now.
Q. Are there lines of research to search for these solutions?
R. There are two things. One is how to convert solar energy into chemical bonds. With electricity, we use capacitors to store it, but we don’t have capacitors good enough to store the energy the world needs. One way to do this is to convert molecules that have low energy into things that have high energy. If you take water and convert it into hydrogen and oxygen, we know that hydrogen and oxygen are fuels and release energy when they return to the water. If you can convert water into oxygen and hydrogen, something people have been trying to do for a long time, you’ve stored all that energy in chemical bonds. There are people thinking a lot about that now.
The other thing is carbon dioxide mineralization. We’ve realized that there are a lot of elements all over the Earth, like sodium, cesium, magnesium, that can capture carbon dioxide to form minerals. The problem is that it takes thousands of years for that to happen and we don’t have that time. We need catalysts that shorten the thousand-year process to half a day or two hours. And there will be more strategies on the way that will use catalysts.
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