,
Dale T. Mortensen,
Christopher A. Pissarides,
Konstantin Novoselov,
Andre Geim,
Akira Suzuki,
Ei-ichi Negishi, and Richard Heck, Nobel Prize Laureates 2010, at a press conference at the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. At Hercules, Heck soon became interested in
organometallic chemistry, including work with
David S. Breslow on
organocobalt reactions. This led to the development of the
Heck reaction, which began with his investigation during the late 1960s of the coupling of
arylmercury compounds with olefins using
palladium as a catalyst. During the early 1970s, Tsutomu Mizoroki independently reported the use of the less toxic aryl halides as the coupling partner in the reaction. Heck became a professor of chemistry at the
University of Delaware's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1971, where he continued to improve the transformation, developing it into a powerful synthetic method for organic synthesis. In 1982, Heck was able to write an
Organic Reactions chapter that covered all the known instances in just 45 pages. By 2002, applications had grown to the extent that the
Organic Reactions chapter published that year, limited to
intramolecular Heck reactions, covered 377 pages. These reactions, a small part of the total, couple two parts of the same molecule. The reaction is now one of the most widely used methods for the creation of
carbon-carbon bonds in the synthesis of
organic chemicals. It has been subject to numerous scientific review articles, including a monograph dedicated to this subject published in 2009. Heck's contributions were not limited to the activation of halides by the oxidative addition of palladium. He was the first to fully characterize a π-allyl metal complex, These palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions are now widely practiced in organic synthesis, including for the manufacture of
pharmaceutical drugs such as
naproxen. Of the several reactions developed by Heck, the greatest societal impact has been from the palladium-catalyzed coupling of an alkyne with an aryl
halide. This is the reaction that was used to couple fluorescent dyes to DNA bases, allowing the automation of
DNA sequencing and the examination of the
human genome; the reaction also allows biologically important proteins to be tracked. In Sonogashira's original report of what is now known as the
Sonogashira coupling, his group modified an alkyne coupling procedure previously reported by Heck, by adding a copper(I) salt. ==Later life and death==