Sauvage, Stoddart, and Feringa win Chemistry Nobel for molecular machines

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is to be awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard Feringa for the development of molecular lifts, motors, and other minuscule machines, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday. The Nobel committee compared the state of molecular motors today to that of the electric motor in the 1830s and cited the potential to create “new materials, sensors, and energy storage systems.”

Following decades of failed attempts by scientists to manipulate molecular structures to do their bidding, Sauvage achieved a major advance in 1983. Then a chemist at CNRS in Strasbourg, France (and now an emeritus professor at the University of Strasbourg), he used copper ions to link rings of hydrocarbon molecules and create chains called catenanes. A decade later, he developed a catenane in which one ring revolved around the other through the addition of electrochemical energy.

Meanwhile Stoddart was expanding the inventory of molecular machine parts. In the early 1990s, Stoddart and his groups at the University of Sheffield and the University of Birmingham in England began producing rotaxanes, which are made up of ringed molecules attached to molecular axles. The addition of heat caused each ring to oscillate along the length of the axle. Over the next 15 years, Stoddart, who is now at Northwestern University, and his colleagues have used rotaxanes to build molecular lifts, muscle-like filaments, and rudimentary computer chips.

The steady progress toward the construction of complex chemical machinery reached a new milestone in 1999. That year Feringa and his group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands built a molecular motor whose two rotors could be made to spin in a given direction when illuminated with UV radiation. Tension created by the rotation of the molecule was immediately dissipated through thermal relaxation, which ensured unidirectional motion. Motors produced by Feringa’s group perform at some 12 million cycles per second and have been used to propel a nanoscopic car.

Feringa’s car and the research that led to it brought to mind the words of Richard Feynman. At a speech at the December 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society, the particle theorist envisioned a future of nanoscale automobiles and other devices: “The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants.”