William Standish Knowles

William Standish Knowles ( born June 1, 1917 in Taunton, Massachusetts, † June 13, 2012 in Chesterfield, Missouri ) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate.

Life

Knowles grew up in New Bedford. He attended a boarding school in Berkshire in the western part of Massachusetts, and in Andover, where he also had his first contact with chemistry.

He studied chemistry at Harvard University and then at Columbia University with Bob Elderfield about steroids. After Knowles in 1942 received his doctorate from Columbia University, he worked until 1986 for the Monsanto Company.

In 1944, he worked in St. Louis on intermediates and later on DDT and chloramphenicol. Monsanto hired at this time Robert B. Woodward in order to advance the commercialization of cortisone. Knowles was assigned Woodward, since he had a background in steroid chemistry. Knowles spent nine months in Cambridge at Woodward. Knowles began his career with Monsanto in the field of Research and Development, where he has worked the mid-sixties in the field of asymmetric synthesis until his retirement in 1986.

Knowles turned asymmetric catalysis with chiral ligands for the first time at Monsanto industrially in the production of L - dopa with the ligand DIPAMP. It was a chirally catalyzed hydrogenation reaction.

Honors

Knowles has received numerous honors and awards for his work. He was awarded the 1974 IR 100 Awards for Asymmetric Hydrogenation and 1978 show, the St. Louis American Chemical Society Section Award. In 1981 he received from the Monsanto Thomas and high Walt Award, a year later the price for Creative Inventions of the American Chemical Society. The Organic Reactions Catalysis Society awarded him the 1996 Paul N. Rylander Award.

In 2001 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions, together with the Japanese Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless his compatriot.