What’s the greenest Nobel Prize? Our columnists reflect on how the Nobel prizes—and not just those for science—have recognized green chemistry insights

No Nobel Prize focuses solely on honoring a subdiscipline of science such as green chemistry. But the prizes in physiology or medicine, physics, and chemistry, and occasionally the other categories, have influenced the way both scientists and the public view so many related issues. These awards have recognized efforts to reduce energy use and waste in the laboratory and in industry and to understand pollution’s impacts on people on the Earth. We won’t know the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry until Oct. 8, but C&EN’s coverage began on Oct. 1, with a panel that predicted this year’s most likely winners. But our four columnists have teamed up this month to recognize four Nobel Prizes that have had the biggest impact on green chemistry. Palladium-catalyzed cross-couplingThere has not been a dedicated Nobel Prize for inherently green advances. But we have indeed had prizes that recognize chemical technologies that the green chemistry world has benefited from. For example, the 2010 chemistry prize awarded to Ei-ichi Negishi, Richard Heck, and Akira Suzuki for “palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis” has empowered extremely robust chemical transformations in so many ways. These palladium-catalyzed reactions have now been translated to greener systems so that they can be performed in aqueous media or are effective without solvents at all. We’ve even seen these cornerstone discoveries expanded on with Earth-abundant metal systems as well as additional methodologies developed in main-group-catalyzed couplings. Through the development of chemistries that are not inherently green in nature, we can