Scottish-born scientist J. Fraser Stoddart went from playing with construction sets as a boy to building molecular machines one-thousandth the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, in 2016. jointly awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. , passed away on December 30th in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82 years old.
His daughter Alison Margaret Stoddart said he died of cardiac arrest at a hotel while visiting his other daughter, Fiona Jane McCubbin.
Stoddart and his co-winners Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France and Bernard L. Feringa of the Netherlands were the first to discover how to build molecules using physical rather than chemical bonds. These molecules were able to move freely and became the building blocks of nanomachines. The most basic ones are called catenanes, which are molecules intertwined like links in a chain. They were first synthesized by Dr. Sauvage in 1983.
In 1991, Dr. Stoddart and his team took the next big leap forward. They created a molecule called rotaxane. Rotaxanes have ring molecules wrapped around other molecules in the shape of dumbbells. The ring molecules slide back and forth on the dumbbell, and the end of the dumbbell prevents the ring molecules from sliding off. (The word rotaxane comes from a Latin root meaning wheel and axle.)
Dr. Stoddart also figured out how to slide the ring molecule between two set points, like a miniature switch, and then combine the three rotaxanes so that they can rise and fall at 1/700 millionth of a meter. We figured out how to create a platform. molecular elevator.
Since these early successes, scientists have been able to build molecular machines that mimic the actions of muscles, contracting and lengthening. A small propeller powered by light energy. Then, in 2011, a small four-wheel-drive molecular car, only one billionth of a meter long, was introduced.
These devices have not yet been put into practical use. However, in announcing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences compared its potential to that of an earlier revolution.
“In terms of development, molecular motors are at the same stage as electric motors in the 1830s, when scientists thought they were used in trains, washing machines, electric fans and food processors.”
Dr. Feringa said one very likely application would be small robots that doctors could inject into patients to seek out and destroy cancer cells or administer drugs.
Dr. Stoddart also sought to use his expertise to find solutions to other problems.
In 2021, he co-founded hydrogen storage and transportation company H2MOF with another leading chemist, Omar Yagi. Hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is notoriously difficult to transport and store. The company uses technology based on molecular materials developed by Dr. Stoddart and Dr. Yagi that allows hydrogen to be stored and transported in a solid state at room temperature and low pressure. This technology could help make hydrogen a more practical source of clean energy.
And in 2019, Dr. Stoddart launched a skincare brand called Noble Panacea, based on porous organic nanovessels he and some of his students developed. The container is said to protect skin care products from degradation and contamination caused by light, oxygen, and water, increasing the efficiency of skin care products.
“I think it's clear that I'm not a typical skin care brand founder,” Dr. Stoddart told Vogue. “Ten years ago, my team and I weren’t particularly thinking about discovering technology in skin care applications. But inventing something with the goal of having a positive impact on people has always been That was my intention.”
James Fraser Stoddart was born on 24 May 1942 in Edinburgh. He was the only child of Thomas Fraser Stoddart, a sharecropper, and Jane (Fortune) Stoddart, who owned a small hotel in Dunbar before their marriage.
When James was six months old, the family moved to a farm called Edgelaw, just south of Edinburgh, where he lived until he was 25 years old. They raised crops and livestock, but there was no electricity. During the cold winter months, families often gathered in the kitchen to keep warm. In his Nobel Prize biography, Dr. Stoddart calls it “a very simple lifestyle.”
Among his few pastimes were Meccano sets, a model-building set popular in Britain at the time, with which he could assemble gadgets. He also became a mechanic. He learned how to disassemble car and tractor engines to clean, repair, and put them back together.
At the age of eight, he transferred from a small village school to Stewart Melville College, an elite boys' school in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh, concentrating on mathematics and science, including organic chemistry. In his third year, his professor hired him to be part of a research group investigating the structural complexity of the acacia plant rubber. That set him on his path.
He graduated in 1964 and received his Ph.D. Within 2 years.
While studying at Edinburgh University, he met a brilliant student named Norma Scholan. They married in 1968 and had two daughters. Fiona and Alison followed in their parents' footsteps, graduating with highest honors and doctorates in chemistry, Fiona from Imperial College, London and Alison from Cambridge University.
Norma Stoddart passed away in 2004. In addition to her daughters, Dr. Stoddart is survived by four grandchildren and one granddaughter.
Dr. Stoddart conducted postdoctoral research at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, before returning to the UK to work as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. He joined the faculty in 1970.
In 1978, he was hired as a researcher by Imperial Chemical Industries, a British chemical company specializing in the production of herbicides. So he started imagining how molecules could be constructed with physical bonds. In a Nobel Prize interview, he said he got the idea in part from the properties of the chemicals the company used to make fertilizer.
Until then, researchers had been trying to synthesize catenanes by combining similar things. The success rate was less than 1 percent. But the herbicide factory successfully combined ingredients from different types of chemicals, and Dr. Stoddart realized that this could be the key to catenane design.
Although he had the right idea, it was still difficult, and Dr. Stoddart and his colleagues faced skepticism from other scientists who doubted that nanomachines were even possible. It would take another 10 years for them to succeed.
After three years at ICI, Dr Stoddart returned to Sheffield to continue his research there.
In 1990, he was hired by the University of Birmingham, where he first synthesized rotaxanes. In 1997 he accepted a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2008 he was hired by Northwestern University, which established the Stoddart MechanoStereochemistry Group, a nanotechnology research institute, in his honor.
He was accepted by the University of Hong Kong in 2023. He was still working there at the time of his death.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Stoddart received the Albert Einstein World Prize for Science in 2007. In 2006, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
During his career, Dr. Stoddart taught and supervised the doctoral studies and research of more than 400 students in 43 countries. But he treated them not as acolytes, but as partners.
“The fact that you're putting together a team and allowing 30 brains to work on something is a top-down situation where you say I have all the ideas and they're just pairs or slaves.” “We realized that we were allowing 30 brains to work on something rather than an approach,'' he said. said in a Nobel Prize interview. He added: “I rebelled against the class system that visited me early in my career and said I would not go down that path. I wanted to create something new and help young people with great talent express their creativity.'' I will continue to do so.”
