8:03 a.m., Nov. 4, 2010----The University of Delaware's annual symposium explaining the work done by the most recent Nobel Prize-winners, which began Oct. 29 with talks by four speakers, featured a special element this year -- one of the laureates in chemistry, Richard F. Heck, was a UD faculty member.

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The first session of the two-part symposium included discussions of the prizes awarded this year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry, as well as the Abel Medal in Mathematics, an award similar in stature to the Nobel. The symposium, which will continue with three speakers on Friday, Nov. 5, is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences.

In welcoming the audience to the first part of the symposium, Doug Doren, associate dean for the natural sciences in the college and the organizer of the event, said it's never a difficult task to find UD faculty members who are familiar with the laureates' influential work.

“The people on our faculty are actively making use of the work the Nobel winners have done,” he said. “One of the signs that we are a great university is that our faculty always includes people who are working on these very important topics.”

Mary Watson, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry who joined the UD faculty about a year ago, spoke about Heck's work, which she uses in her own research. She told the audience that although the description of the research for which Heck and two other chemists shared the Nobel Prize may sound obscure, it “probably affects your life every single day.”

Heck, the Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry who retired from UD in 1989, was honored for his research on palladium-catalyzed cross coupling reactions in organic chemistry. Heck worked with palladium, a “transitional metal” located in the central part of the periodic table of elements, and discovered how to use it to allow a reaction between two carbon-containing molecules that previously could not have occurred.

“The Heck Reaction changed the way molecules are made and changed what molecules can be made,” Watson said, adding that beginning around 1993, numerous other researchers began making widespread use of the discovery, which they called the Heck Reaction. “There are molecules we couldn't have made without this reaction.”

The results of Heck's groundbreaking discovery, she said, have had “broad implications and broad applications” in fields including human health and medicine, energy and the environment. Examples of products that are manufactured using the reaction are certain anti-inflammatory pain relievers such as Aleve, the asthma treatment Singulair and key components of sunscreen and some herbicides, Watson said.

Also speaking at the symposium were:

• Patricia DeLeon, Trustees Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences, discussed Nobel Laureate Robert G. Edwards' pioneering work on in vitro fertilization. “Infertility is a widespread problem, a worldwide problem” experienced by about 15 percent of couples, DeLeon said. Edwards, she said, was ahead of his time, not only in his medical discoveries but also in his attention to the ethical issues involved.

• Branislav Nikolic, associate professor of physics and astronomy, explained the work conducted by prize-winners Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who discovered the two-dimensional material graphene. Nikolic called their work “remarkable” -- just a single atom thick, graphene is 10 times stronger than steel and conducts heat 10 times better than copper -- especially because they created the material by using ordinary graphite like that found in pencils and peeling off thin layers using adhesive tape.

• Wenbo Li, professor of mathematical sciences, discussed John Torrence Tate, who won the 2010 Abel Medal in Mathematics for his impact on number theory, which studies the properties of integers. Tate introduced various new techniques that “revolutionized modern number theory and provided insights into some of the oldest mathematical problems,” Li said.

On Nov. 5, the second part of the Nobel Symposium, focusing on literature, peace and economics, will begin with lunch at noon in the lobby of the Roselle Center for the Arts and then move into Gore Recital Hall at 12:30 p.m. for a series of 20-minute talks. The events, including lunch, are free and open to the public, with no registration required.

The literature talk will be delivered by Angel Esteban, a visiting professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, who personally knows the 2010 Nobel laureate for literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, and has written two books about him.

Jianguo Chen, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, will speak about the work of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo, a nonviolent activist for human rights in China, and Saul Hoffman, professor and chairperson of the Department of Economics, will discuss work by Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides, who jointly won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, for the “analysis of markets with search frictions,” which explains why job vacancies can be difficult to fill even at times of high unemployment.

Article by Ann Manser
Photo by Kathy Atkinson