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Chemistry needs rebranding, says Nobel laureate
David MacMillan, Nobel Prize winner, emphasizes the need for sustainable chemistry and innovation in India, urging a rebranding of the field for public interest.
Long before he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2021 for using environmentally friendly molecules as catalysts instead of metals or enzymes, David MacMillan — James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry, at Princeton University — realised the importance of making the world better for everyone.
Two routine events sowed the seed — watching bright red night skies from his home in New Stevenston, a small village in Scotland that was sandwiched between two steel works and a coal mine, and BBC shows in the 70s.
“Every night, at about one o’clock in the morning, the whole sky would get lit up because it (steel factories) would pour (molten) steel. It made me understand that there are people who constantly figure out ways of making the world better for everyone, not just a small number of people,” said MacMillan on Thursday, seated in the Spanish Suite at Taj Mahal Palace, Colaba.
“The shows on BBC were about what’s going to happen in the future. It shaped my curiosity about where the future was going to be, to have an impact, to want to change the world.”
In Mumbai since Wednesday, MacMillan was finishing his three-day visit to India. The 57-year-old along with Nobel Prize laureate James Robinson (economic sciences 2024) were part of the Nobel Prize Dialogue India 2025, hosted by Tata Trusts in collaboration with Nobel Prize Outreach.
In 2021, MacMillan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Benjamin List — one of the directors of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany — for developing a new type of catalysis — called asymmetric organocatalysts — that builds upon small organic molecules. Catalysts are substances that make existing chemical reactions easier, faster and allow new chemical reactions without becoming part of the final product.
In his talk on the ‘The future we want’ in Bengaluru, MacMillan said 90% of industrial scale chemical reactions use catalysis and 35% global GDP is based on catalysis. While metals used for catalysis are expensive, toxic and non-sustainable (palladium used in iPhones and cars, for instance, is enough only to last 90 years), organic molecules for catalysis are inexpensive, safe and sustainable.
Today, said MacMillan, hundreds of reactions use organocatalysis with application in medicine, agrochemicals, flavours and perfumes, among other fields.
MacMillan owes his love for chemistry to his older brother. “I ended up going to university almost by mistake. It was because of my brother. But once I was there, I realised I really loved chemistry,” he said, adding that using organic molecules for catalysis was always on the top of his mind, starting from his postdoc at Harvard University.
Recalling his Eureka moment in his lab, MacMillan said, “It taught me a really great lesson, that first and foremost you should be thinking about what are the things you want to do even though you have no idea how to do them. That way you start from the end and work your way back to the beginning. It’s important to think of the future you want to see.”
But MacMillan laments that the idea or conversations of what the future is going to look like has “sort of disappeared”. “People don’t talk about the future. All you hear about is AI this, and AI that. No one really knows what it’s going to do, everyone thinks it’s going to do something,” said MacMillan. “When we were young, people would say we’ll have flying cars in the future, but at least people had this imagination about how different the future was going to be and it was exciting. We don’t quite have that as much as we used to and that’s a real shame because it’s so inspiring.”
On his maiden trip to India, MacMillan’s visit to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research left him impressed. “The young people are doing some pretty significant things (in organic chemistry), and I get the impression that’s more and more of what people want to do in India. India is massively moving into innovation and one can see that’s where chemistry is also strongly going in India,” said MacMillan.
“Through the Nobel Prize Dialogue, we are here to help further encourage and if anything, press the accelerator even more because good things are happening in India.”
But when it comes to chemistry there’s one universal problem, said MacMillan. “Chemistry has terrible PR (public relations). Normally, you have people talking about physics and biology, but very rarely chemistry. If you’re a biologist, you can tell people you’re working on medicine. A physicist can say s/he is working on black holes. But if you are a chemist, people have largely no interest in what you’re doing. So it’s a very global phenomenon. We need a rebranding of chemistry.”
