Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction equipment as a boy to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, in which he participated Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016He died on December 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82 years old.
His daughter, Alison Margaret Stoddart, said he died of cardiac arrest in a hotel while visiting his other daughter, Fiona Jane McCubbin.
Dr. Stoddart and his award-winning colleagues, Jean-Pierre Sauvage France and Bernard L. Veringa From the Netherlands, he was the first to discover how to build molecules with physical bonds instead of chemical bonds. These molecules can move freely and have become the building blocks of nanomachines. The simplest ones, called catenases, are cross-linked molecules, like links in a chain. It was first manufactured by Dr. Sauvage in 1983.
In 1991, Dr. Stoddart and his team made the next big leap: they created molecules called rotaxanes, which contained cyclic molecules wrapped around other dumbbell-shaped molecules. The ring molecule slides back and forth on the dumbbell, the ends of which prevent the ring molecule from sliding. (The word rotaxane comes from Latin roots meaning wheel and axle.)
Dr. Stoddart went on to figure out how to make the ring molecules slide between two fixed points, like a miniature switch, and then how to put three rotaxanes together to create a platform that can rise and fall by 0.7 billionths of a metre—essentially, one 0.7-billionth of a meter. Molecular elevator.
Since those early successes, scientists have been able to build molecular machines that contract and stretch, replicating the action of muscles. Small fans driven by light energy; In 2011, a small, four-wheel-drive molecular car appeared, albeit only a few billionths of a meter in length.
These devices have little practical application yet. But when announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences compared its potential to that of a previous revolution.
The academy said: “In terms of evolution, the molecular motor is at the same stage as the electric motor was in the 1830s, when scientists showed off numerous cranks and spinning wheels, unaware that they would lead to electric trains, washing machines, fans and food processors.
Dr. Feringa said one very potential application would be small robots that doctors could inject into patients to search for and destroy cancer cells or deliver drugs.
Dr. Stoddart used his experience to try to find solutions to other problems as well.
In 2021, he co-founded H2MOF, a hydrogen storage and transportation company, with Omar Yaghi, another leading chemist. Hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is notoriously difficult to transport and store. The company uses a technology based on molecular materials developed by Dr. Stoddart and Dr. Yaghi, which 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.
In 2019, Dr. Stoddart introduced a skincare brand called Noble Panacea, based on porous organic nanovessels that he and some of his students developed. The vessels are said to protect skin care products from deterioration or contamination by light, oxygen or water, making them more efficient.
“I think it’s clear that I’m not a typical skincare brand founder,” Dr. Stoddart said Fogg said. “A decade ago, my team and I weren’t specifically thinking about discovering technology for skincare applications. But inventing things with the goal of making a positive impact on people was always my intention.”
James Fraser Stoddart was born on 24 May 1942 in Edinburgh. He was the only child of Thomas Fraser Stoddart, a tenant farmer, and Jane (Fortune) Stoddart, who owned a small hotel in Dunbar before her marriage.
The family moved to a farm called Edgelow, south of Edinburgh, when James was six months old, and lived there until he was 25. They grew crops and livestock, but they had no electricity. During cold winters, the family often gathers in the kitchen to keep warm. In his country Nobel biographyDr. Stoddart described it as “a very simple lifestyle.”
Among his few toys were Meccano sets, model building kits popular in Britain at the time, which he could use to build tools. He also became a mechanic. He learned how to take apart car and tractor engines to clean and repair them and then put them back together.
When he was eight, he moved from his small village school to Stuart Melville College, an elite boys’ school in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on mathematics and science, including organic chemistry. During his third year, his professor assigned him to be part of a research group investigating the structural complexities of acacia gum. Which set him on his path.
He graduated in 1964 and then completed his doctorate. In two years.
While at the University of Edinburgh, he met his brilliant classmate Norma Scholan. They married in 1968 and had two daughters, Fiona and Alison, who followed in their parents’ footsteps, achieving the highest honors and a PhD in Chemistry – Fiona from Imperial College London and Alison from Cambridge University.
Norma Stoddart died in 2004. In addition to his daughters, Dr. Stoddart is survived by four grandchildren and a granddaughter.
Dr. Stoddart conducted postdoctoral research at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, then returned to England to work as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. – He joined the college in 1970.
In 1978, he was appointed as a researcher at Imperial Chemical Industries, a British chemical company specializing in the manufacture of herbicides. There he began to imagine how molecules with physical bonds could be built. In his country Nobel interviewHe said he got the idea in part from the properties of the chemicals the company uses to make fertilizer.
Until then, researchers had been trying to make catins by “matching similar types of chemicals.” The success rate was less than 1 percent. But the herbicide plant was successfully combining components from different families of chemicals, and Dr. Stoddart realized that this could be the key to designing catechins.
He had the right idea, but it was still difficult, and Dr. Stoddart and his colleagues faced skepticism from other scientists, who doubted the possibility of nanomachines. It would be another decade before they succeeded.
After three years at ICI, Dr Stoddart returned to Sheffield, where he continued his research.
In 1990, he was appointed to the University of Birmingham, where he first synthesized rotaxane. In 1997, he accepted a job at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2008 he was hired by Northwestern University, which established a nanotechnology research institute in his honor, the Stoddart Mechanochemical Group.
In 2023, he was recruited by the University of Hong Kong. He was working there when he died.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Stoddart received the Albert Einstein World Science Prize in 2007. Queen Elizabeth II also knighted him in 2006.
Over the years, Dr. Stoddart has mentored and supervised the doctoral dissertations and research of more than 400 students from 43 countries. But he treated them more as partners than as assistants.
“I realized that you put a team together and allow the minds of 30 people to work on something rather than taking a top-down approach, where you say I have all the ideas and these are just pairs of hands or slaves.” He said in his Nobel Prize interview.
He added: “I am rebelling against the hierarchical system that visited me at the beginning of my career, and I said that I would not follow this path. I will design something new and make it possible for young people with amazing talent to express their creativity.
