Benjamin List

Max Planck Institute for Coal Research

Benjamin List directs the homogeneous-catalysis department at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr and holds an honorary professorship at the University of Cologne. In 2021 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognised him, jointly with David MacMillan, for inventing asymmetric organocatalysis: a way to build single-handed (chiral) molecules using small, metal-free organic catalysts rather than enzymes or expensive transition-metal complexes. The breakthrough came in 2000 when List demonstrated that proline, an ordinary amino acid, drives the intermolecular aldol reaction with high enantiocontrol via a fleeting enamine intermediate — proof that tiny organic molecules can mimic the precision of nature's biocatalysts. Over the following two decades his group engineered increasingly powerful and sterically confined chiral Brønsted acids, notably the imidodiphosphate (IDP) and IDPi families, which catalyse Mukaiyama aldol, spiroacetalisation, and fluorination reactions once considered hopeless for selective control. Because such catalysts are cheap, air-stable, non-toxic, and easy to recover, they have made the manufacture of medicines, agrochemicals, and flavours markedly greener. List trained under Johann Mulzer for his doctorate at Goethe University Frankfurt, spent his formative postdoctoral years in antibody-catalysis research at Scripps in La Jolla, and today also serves as a principal investigator at Hokkaido University's WPI-ICReDD reaction-design institute in Japan.