Trio win Nobel for ‘great art in a test tube’

THREE scientists shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for forging a toolkit to manipulate carbon atoms, paving the way for new drugs to fight cancer, HIV, and for the development of revolutionary plastics.

Richard Heck of the United States and Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki of Japan were hailed for producing “great art in a test tube”.

The trio made outstanding contributions in organic chemistry, a field whose basis is carbon, one of the essential atoms of life and also of innumerable industrial synthetics.