Sunburnt and impressed - by all the beautiful and super smart people he met at the 2022 Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau.
Chemist Benjamin List enthusiastically tweeted a selfie on July 1, his blue shirt perfectly matching the cloudy sky, his face glowing pink, people waving in the background.
Perhaps they were just as enthusiastic and, within thirty minutes, were fascinated by catalysis from the director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, as were so many others before them who – alongside the Scottish and Princeton professor David MacMillan - newly crowned chemistry Nobel Prize winner - talked about his specialty.
Sonya Kastilan
Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
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Chemistry is not one of the most popular school subjects, but the lecture that List held at Lake Constance and which can be accessed on the Internet, could fuel interest: It's not a nerd who speaks so confidently and intoxicatingly, but a really cool guy, who cheerfully greets his audience on " Universal Catalysts for Selective Synthesis”.
Although List is a "newbie" in the elite circle of Nobel Prize winners, as he says himself, he is by no means modest when he counts catalysis among the most important achievements of mankind and equates it with agriculture, the bicycle, the car or the Internet: a technology that will determine our future, List is convinced of that.
But before he takes his listeners along the complex path to get there, reaction by reaction, List starts with photosynthesis,
what he believes to be the most beautiful of all processes on our planet.
After all, plants, which capture carbon dioxide from the air with their leaves, use light to make the material we eat and give us the oxygen we breathe.
What would be more useful than that?