ON 5 October, two days before the Nobel prize committee honoured the IAEA for keeping nuclear weapons in check, it made another bold statement by paying tribute to “green chemistry”.
The Nobel prize for chemistry went to three organic chemists – Yves Chauvin of the French Petroleum Institute in Rueil-Malmaison, Robert Grubbs of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Richard Schrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for furthering an organic reaction called “metathesis” – meaning “changing places”. In these reactions, double bonds between carbon atoms are broken and re-formed such that groups of atoms can be made…
