Josep Cornella doesn’t deal in absolutes. While chemists typically draw rigid lines between organic and inorganic chemistry, Cornella, a researcher at Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, believes in just the opposite.
“You have to be open to cross boundaries,” he says, “and learn from it.” The fringes are “where the rich new things are.”
Cornella is an industrial organic chemist. He synthesizes compounds that contain carbon. But he’s put together a team from a wide range of backgrounds: inorganic chemists, physical organic chemists, computational chemists. The team works together to develop new methods for designing catalysts to make critical chemical reactions in pharmaceuticals and agriculture more efficient and friendlier to the environment. Cornella solved mysteries that had puzzled chemists for many years.
“He has told us about catalysts … that we didn’t have before, and which were just pipe dreams,” says Hosea Nelson, a chemist at Caltech who has not worked with Cornella.
Bold idea
Cornella thought it was a mistake when a speaker from a 2014 conference said that bismuth is not toxic. Bismuth is A heavy metal that is somewhere between toxic lead or polonium on a periodic table. But it is indeed relatively nontoxic — it’s even used in the over-the-counter nausea medicine Pepto-Bismol.
Bismuth is still poorly understood. That’s one reason it attracted him. “It was a rather forgotten element of the periodic table,” Cornella says. But, “it’s there for a reason.”
Cornella began to wonder if an element such as bismuth could possibly be used as a catalyst. Since the beginning of the 20th century, scientists have used transition metals such as iron and palladium to power industrial synthesis. “Could we actually train [bismuth] to do what these guys do so well?” he asked. It was a conceptual question that “was completely naïve, or maybe stupid.”
It was not stupid. His team used bismuth to create a carbon-fluorine link. And bismuth didn’t just mimic a transition metal’s role — it worked better. It was much more efficient than the transition metal to accomplish the same task, and only a tiny amount of bismuth is required.
“A lot of people, including myself and other [researchers] around the world, have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make bismuth reactions catalytic,” Nelson says. “He’s the guy who cracked that nut.”
Standout research
While the bismuth research is “weird” and “exciting,” Cornella says, it remains a proof of concept. Bismuth, though cheap, is not as abundant as he had hoped, so it’s not a very sustainable option for industry.
However, Cornella team results are already being applied in real life. The group devised a way to create a Ni(COD-like) alternative in 2019.2This is a finicky catalyst that is often used by chemists in a lab. If it’s not kept at freezing temperatures and protected from oxygen by a layer of inert gases, the nickel complex falls apart.
The alternative complex, developed by Lukas Nattmann, a Ph.D. student in Cornella’s lab at the time, Stays stable in oxygen at room temperatures. It’s a game changer: It saves energy and materials, and it’s universal. “You can basically take all those reactions that were developed for 60 years of Ni(COD)2 and basically replace all of them with our catalyst, and it works just fine,” Cornella says.
“A lot of people … have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make bismuth reactions catalytic. He’s the guy who cracked that nut.”
Hosea Nelson
Cornella’s lab is also developing new reagents, substances that transform one material into another. The researchers are looking to transform atoms in functional groups — specific groupings of atoms that behave in specific ways regardless of the molecules they are found in — into other atoms in a single step. These reactions can be done in one step, which could reduce preparation time by two weeks to one day. This would be extremely useful for the pharmaceutical industry.
Taking risks
It’s the success that gets attention, but failure is “our daily basis,” Cornella says. “It’s a lot of failure.” As a student, when he couldn’t get a reaction to work, he’d set up a simple reaction called a TBS protection — the kind of reaction that’s impossible to get wrong — to remind himself that he wasn’t “completely useless.”
He runs a lab today that encourages taking chances. He encourages students learn from each other about areas they are not familiar with. For instance, a pure organic chemist could come into Cornella’s lab and leave with a good understanding of organometallic chemistry after spending long days working alongside a colleague who is an expert in that area.
Cornella believes that sharing knowledge is essential. “If you tackle a problem from just one unique perspective,” he says, “maybe you’re missing some stuff.”
While Cornella might not like absolutes, Phil Baran, who advised Cornella during his postdoctoral work at Scripps Research in San Diego, sees Cornella as fitting into one of two distinct categories: “There are chemists who do chemistry in order to eat, like it’s a job. And there are chemists who eat in order to do chemistry,” Baran says. Cornella is part of the latter category. “It’s his oxygen.”
You would like to nominate someone on the next SN 10 List? Please send your name, affiliation, and a few sentences about yourself and your work to sn10@sciencenews.org.
