Nobel Laureate David MacMillan Sees Revolutionary Change on the Horizon
“We’re one catalytic reaction away from solving climate change,” says David MacMillan, co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and professor at Princeton University.
The source of his enthusiasm is a process to catalyze the mineralization of aerobic carbon, changing carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbonate rock, otherwise known as limestone.**
Intellectual Generosity: Driver of Scientific Breakthroughs
For the Scottish chemist, who is now 56, science is about excitement, curiosity, risk taking, creative thinking—and being willing to shun groupthink. Even more fundamentally, it’s about gratitude and sharing of discoveries, for without these values, science would be siloed and selfish.
“Generosity,” MacMillan says, “is really important as a scientist because you’re going to have to be around other people, and you’re going to have to give and take and share” with other scientists. If you don’t, he warns, a person’s career will surely suffer.
He believes in karma, though not in a spiritual sense. “I really do believe that people who are generous, the world knows they’re generous and gives them back fivefold. … Being generous as a scientist is an extraordinarily important attribute.”
MacMillan and his wife used his share of the Nobel Prize money (about $500,000) to set up the May and Billy MacMillan Charitable Fund, in honor of his parents for their lifelong support.
Speaking of gratitude, MacMillan and his wife used his share of the Nobel Prize money (about $500,000) to set up the May and Billy MacMillan Charitable Fund, in honor of his parents for their lifelong support. MacMillan’s wife is Jiin Kim MacMillan, of Korean ancestry, who is a chemist and pharmaceutical industry consultant involved in drug development. They have three daughters.
“My parents cared enormously about giving us opportunities,” the Nobel laureate says. “They cared about education. They’d give you the shirts off their backs to allow you to better yourself. So, this seemed like a great way to honor what they did for me and my siblings.”
The foundation provides educational opportunities for financially disadvantaged students in Scotland. It selects a program in Scotland each year for a one-time grant. The first recipient was the University of Glasgow, spurred by MacMillan’s appreciation for helping launch him on his career path and because “they have a great program in place to help underprivileged kids get to university and stay there.”
“I also think it’s so important to give back,” MacMillan says. “There were so many people, our predecessors, who created opportunities for people like me. So, to get the opportunity to also do the same thing going forward is important.”
The scientist hails from the hamlet of New Stevenston, next to the small town of Bellshill, nestled between two giant steel mills in a coal mining area about 10 miles from Glasgow. His father was a steelworker and his mother a maid, and he was raised in government housing in a row house community.
His brother Iain was the first in his family to attend university, and he did so against his parents’ wishes. But when Iain got a job the first day after graduating that earned more than their father’s, the senior MacMillan became a fan of undergraduate study and pushed David there. The scientist says that his brother is his life’s inspiration.
‘Study What Speaks to You’
MacMillan’s advice for someone just getting into chemistry—or any field of science—is to “sample it, see what speaks to you.”
“[O]nce you think, ‘I really like this,’ regardless of whether you’re in college or high school, go find someone who’s doing that in a lab.”
“Second, once you think, ‘I really like this,’ regardless of whether you’re in college or high school, go find someone who’s doing that in a lab. And sort of beg or pray to join that lab and work there part time for a summer. Then, if there is still the feeling, ’This is fun. I really enjoy doing science,’ immerse yourself, throw yourself into it,” MacMillan says.
In the 1980s, during his first year at the University of Glasgow, studying physics, MacMillan many times felt close to dropping out. He tried getting various jobs but wasn’t good at job interviews, so he couldn’t land any work.
In his second university year, however, “it was not so much I found organic chemistry as organic chemistry found me.” He had to travel an hour to his classes and then an hour home, and during this time he would devour a worn organic chemistry textbook. After a while, he was far ahead of his coursework and could truly begin to feel how organic molecules come together on the nanoscopic level.
He came to feel he could do chemistry naturally—and joyfully. “There’s a lot of fun in doing that, and that’s what organic chemistry felt like to me.”
Questioning Science Orthodoxy
Regarding the pre-2000 consensus thinking around metal catalysts, the Nobel Prize winner says, “The way the chemistry works in this one area—everyone does it this way, [but] does it make sense? And some of it made sense, but some of it seemed kind of strange to me that we were doing it in this bizarre [metal-catalyst] way. So, we started to question, are there other ways to do it? Are there other ways to think about it? And that’s when we started to have ideas about going in this completely different direction.”
[T]hose who hold the purse strings—that is, the research-proposal reviewers at the various foundations and government agencies—are often constrained by chemistry orthodoxy.
He also noted that without donor funding there’s no scientific progress. But those who hold the purse strings—that is, the research-proposal reviewers at the various foundations and government agencies—are often constrained by chemistry orthodoxy.
“Funding agencies are great,” MacMillan said, “but sometimes reviewers for funding agencies are difficult because reviewers are often looking for things based on what we already know. And sometimes young [researchers] want to go in a completely different direction that makes no sense compared to what we already know. ... So, we do the things that ‘make sense’ as opposed to the things that are more unusual or higher risk.”
'Eureka’ Moment
MacMillan’s “eureka” moment in the organocatalysis field came in 1998 as a first-year assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley. A first-year graduate student in his lab, Tristan Lambert, asked him a simple question about a particular organic chemical reaction.
“I went to the board, I was drawing up the answer to the question, and right there, right then, we had the idea,” MacMillan said. “But I thought, it looks too simple, there’s no way this is going to work. [But] we tested it that afternoon, and it worked—that afternoon!”
MacMillan’s discovery was that simple, cheap organic molecules could perform the same molecular-level breaking-and-joining catalytic function as expensive toxic metals. Organocatalysis was born.
He is often asked what is going to be the next big development in organocatalysis, and he tells people, “I have absolutely no idea. But … it’s not going to be based on who has the most money. It’s going to be based on who has the best idea.”
** MacMillan notes that there is an enormous amount of alkali metal salts that exist in the Earth’s crust, slowly absorbing CO2 to create carbonates. But this happens at a snail’s pace.
“So, if you can accelerate that process through catalysis, it would easily be the world’s most important chemical reaction,” he says.
(For a detailed account of organocatalysis and MacMillan’s breakthrough, see “How Catalysis is Poised to Rock Our World" and "Innovations in Chemical Catalysis Will Revolutionize the Future” by David MacMillan.)
*Robert Selle is a freelance writer and editor, based in Bowie, Maryland.
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