Nobel Prize in Chemistry, October 2010

Palladium-catalyzed cross-couplings in organic synthesis

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. It was awarded for the discovery of the above-noted process which allows a substance found in nature to be easily and quickly made in the lab. The compound, discodermolide, is produced by a sponge, a creature at the simplest end of the Animal Kingdom. Sponges are of the phylum Porifera, which describes their biology aptly—they have no circulatory or digestive systems and survive by absorbing nutrients and oxygen as water rushes through their porous bodies. The sponge of interest, Discodermia dissoluta, inhabits the Caribbean waters and links together carbon molecules in a way to make this discodermolide which happens to poison its predators.

As I listen to the report, I imagine there was a rush to analyze discodermolide to see if it might mortify any of our major enemies, perhaps cancer? The compound does have anti-cancer properties, but the harvesting of enough dissoluta for widespread chemotherapy would be difficult, if not impossible, while giving it top billing on the endangered species list. The chemists hit their labs and set about synthesizing the compound. They were successful. Three Homo sapiens were awarded the prize for their method which allows discodermolide to be made more quickly and easily using palladium to speed up the carbon bonding process.

I am grateful for the creativity and persistence of these researchers as my dad sits in the oncology treatment room every Thursday this month with the cancer poisons flowing into one of his left arm veins. The radio commentator concludes:

You know, nature has figured out a lot of really remarkable reactions. And the trick, as you say, is to put them into some kind of format where you can use them in a commercial process and make enough of it to use.

We have the trick down. Dedicated and stubborn men and women racked their brains, spent years under the fluorescents in the organic lab, and found the format to create the commercial process for the manufacture of these compounds. Like these dogged scientists, did nature figure out the initial process that enabled a sponge to form a complex enemy-repelling poison? Does nature possess that kind of intellectual capacity and imagination? Isn’t there perhaps One who exceeds our organic chemists in creativity and intellect, who crafted the poison-producing sponges of the Caribbean as well as the Nobel-winning scientists; the One not far from each of us, in whom we live, and move, and are?