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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Benjamin List of Germany, of the Max Planck Institute, and to David WC MacMillan of Scotland, who does research at Princeton. Both are very young compared to the average age of Nobel laureates: they are 53 years old. They developed techniques to build new molecules used among other things in the pharmaceutical industry. Thanks to a new type of catalysis – called asymmetric organocatalysis – they were able to obtain organic molecules with a simpler and more effective procedure.
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