This man is a discovery.

An extraordinary mind, educated, a survivor, a forerunner and a free thinker, a type of researcher.

Admittedly, without the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which the Swedish Royal Academy awarded him on Wednesday in Stockholm, he and his successes with "asymmetric organocatalysis" would probably have remained the island knowledge of insiders for a while.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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But this is how it is out: Benjamin List, the nephew of the only German Nobel Prize winner, the Tübingen developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, descendant of a Justus von Liebig student and a great doctor, has risen to the Olympus of science. You could also say: Fate carried him up and his, as he told the young Federal Agency for Jump Innovations in a podcast worth listening to, “disrespect” and “certain informality” as a chemist.

List likes to think new, tradition slows down. He was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1968 and raised to be anti-authoritarian. His reference person back then, as it was called in the “Kinderladen”, was the great-green Daniel Cohn-Bendit. His first chemical feat, however, was black and highly explosive. At the age of eleven, List had just discovered a scientific streak in himself, he was making black powder with a friend. With a bit of bad luck, this could have been the beginning of a series of fateful catastrophes.

His luck was challenged on Christmas 2004 in Khao Lak, Thailand, when the tsunami wave almost tore him, his wife and his three and five year old sons apart. List, like his elder, was injured; they later found their three-year-old, who had been swept away by the flood, in a distant clinic. Back in Mülheim an der Ruhr, where List had accepted his post as director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in 2005, fate was asked again. The newly occupied Max Planck Villa burned abundantly after the two sons were cooking up in the wood-paneled room and noticed the fire too late.

So now the jackpot.

Göran Hansson, the spokesman for the Swedish Academy, introduced List to the world as someone “who has been delighted with the Nobel Prize like no other before him”.

In the California sun, at the Scripps Research Institute, the chemist had his groundbreaking ideas for organic catalysis with tiny, ring-shaped proline - a metal-free, environmentally friendly process that promises to revolutionize more than just pharmaceuticals.

When chemistry becomes greener, for example with bioplastics and energy-saving syntheses, it is thanks to him.

In fact, the List process comes very close to what chemists of all time are looking for: the perfect chemical reaction.