Washington (AFP)

The Nobel laureate in chemistry Ei-ichi Negishi, awarded in 2010 with his compatriot Akira Suzuki and the American Richard Heck, has died at the age of 85, announced Friday the American university where he taught.

Mr. Negishi died in Indianapolis on Sunday and his family plan to have his body repatriated to Japan next year, according to Purdue University.

The three chemists were awarded the Nobel for creating one of the most sophisticated tools in chemistry, paving the way for cancer treatments and revolutionary electronics and plastics.

Their discoveries allow hundreds of scientists to synthesize many substances found in nature across the world, from the Italian seas to the oceans of the Philippines to the Indonesian jungle of Borneo, according to the Nobel committee.

Mr Negishi had likened their work to a game with "legos (which) can be put together to make things of any shape, size or color," the Purdue statement noted.

“The world has lost a tall and lovely man, someone who made a difference in people's lives as a scientist and as a human being,” noted Purdue chairman Mitch Daniels.

"We are saddened by his passing but grateful for his discoveries which changed the world," he adds.

Born in 1935 in Changchun, a Japanese city at the time but now Chinese, Professor Negishi grew up in Japan where he had completed his high school education before joining a chemical and pharmaceutical company, Teijin.

But he quickly realized that in order to make top-flight chemistry, he had to go to the United States "which at the time was a dominant country" in scientific research.

Mr. Negishi arrived in the United States in 1960 to study at the University of Philadelphia where he obtained his doctorate in 1963. In 1979, he was appointed professor at Purdue University (Indiana, United States) where he later became professor emeritus.

It was by rubbing shoulders with several laureates of the prestigious prize that he had acquired the certainty that the Nobel "is not just a fiction, it is a reality and, in theory, anyone can receive it, even me" .

© 2021 AFP