Nobel Inspiration

Today we had the honour of having Prof. Richard R. Schrock at Imperial for his very first post-Nobel lecture. The lecture was so over subscribed that YS, CY and I had to cram into one of the LT's aisle steps but it was worth the stiff limbs. He was in town by invitation to deliver the Sir Edward Frankland Award Lecture of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which is one of the highest honour to be awarded to any chemist in this part of the world. He was awarded this year's Chemistry Nobel Prize for his work on 'development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis'. I quote because I'm not chemistry-savvy and I won't do him justice if I don't get it correct, so there.

He didn't give a talk about the work he is now famous for, but did his uni a huge advertising favour by telling us that we can download the full lecture from the MIT website. (I did a google search, and there were over 200,000 hits on him, is this guy famous or what? *of course he is, he won a Nobel prize, silly!*) but he did entertain us with an excellent lecture on another brunch of his work which involves di-nitrogen reduction to ammonia via a postulated catalytic pathway which involves a complicated looped sequence of protons and electrons additions. Well, unfortunately that's as much as I understood anyway, this being my first chemistry lecture since 1997. :P He came up with the pathway and spent years (we are looking at 10-20 years?) proving it, and to date they have managed to isolate and prove the existence of 8 out of 14 intermediates and he reckons it'll take another 20 for this pathway to be fully characterised.

This is what amazes me. The ability of some researchers and scientists to keep themselves highly motivated and continuously interested in their work. Even though a certain part may have stumped them for years, they will revisit it eventually. Giving up and letting the problem rest is never their motto. Will I be able to spend my entire life proving a certain thing that perhaps I am the only one in the universe interested in it? There are so many scientists out there doing their thing, prodding along independently, poking at unanswered or unimportant issues that no one gives a damn for until a certain call at 5am in the morning congratulates them of their win and an hour later everyone wants to know you. How many people would remember Prof. Schrock or even Greg Miller (neuticles research) if they did not receive any Nobel prize or even an Ig Nobel prize? (for experiments that cannot or should not be repeated)

Meeting Prof. Schrock today brings back fond memories of a certain CivEng professor at Berkeley who finds it difficult to stop working over lunch. Whenever my project group visits him at lunchtime he would be happy for the audience and describe eagerly to us the recent topic of his research and his eyes would literally twinkle. We have to let him express all that excitement before we can get down to discussing matters that we came for. Needless to say, his lunch was usually forgotten. I used to think he was quite a workaholic but now I know better. There is huge a difference between working under obligation and working for new discoveries. Stress hormones drives the gears in the first but pure adrenaline gets the latter going.

I hope that one day I can have that adrenaline driven enthusiasm like my Berkeley professor and exhilarate in the experience.