- Person
- Herbert C. Brown
- Lived
- 1912–2004
- Field
- Organic chemistry
- From
- British-born American
The story
Making a new medicine usually means building a complex molecule step by step, and every step needs a reliable chemical tool. Herbert C. Brown, born Herbert Brovarnik in London in 1912 to Jewish immigrants from Zhitomir in Ukraine and raised above his father’s hardware store in Chicago, spent his career creating such tools from the element boron.
During the Second World War, working with his mentor Hermann Irving Schlesinger at the University of Chicago on a government project, Brown helped discover a practical way to make sodium borohydride, a compound of sodium, boron and hydrogen. When the team tried to separate it from a by-product with acetone, they found it chemically reduced the acetone. Sodium borohydride turned out to be a mild, safe and selective way to turn aldehydes and ketones into alcohols without disturbing the rest of a molecule. At Purdue University, Brown and his students developed a whole range of related reagents of different strengths. The Swedish Academy noted in 1979 that sodium borohydride had become the reagent of choice for this kind of reaction.
In the 1950s Brown’s co-worker B. C. Subba Rao noticed that boron and hydrogen could be added across a carbon–carbon double bond. Brown developed this into hydroboration, a reaction that turns simple compounds into organoboranes, which can then be converted cleanly into alcohols and many other products. The Academy called organoboranes the most versatile reagents ever created in organic chemistry. The work also led to early methods for making single mirror-image forms of molecules, which matters for medicines. Brown shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Georg Wittig.
His influence spread through his students. Akira Suzuki was inspired by Brown’s book Hydroboration and worked in his laboratory, and Ei-ichi Negishi spent six years with him. Both later developed palladium-catalysed cross-coupling, and the Suzuki reaction, which uses organoboron compounds, became a mainstay of pharmaceutical and materials chemistry. When they shared the 2010 Nobel Prize, the Academy said humanity benefits from this chemistry through medicines, electronics and advanced materials.
Why it matters
Brown’s boron reagents, and the cross-coupling chemistry his students built on them, are used daily to make medicines and materials.
About Herbert C. Brown
Son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who turned boron compounds into everyday tools for building molecules, including sodium borohydride and hydroboration, used in making medicines. Nobel 1979.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1979 NobelPrize.org
- Herbert C. Brown, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Akira Suzuki, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010 NobelPrize.org
- Herbert C. Brown Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.