How Prof. Richard Schrock was Awarded a Nobel Prize as a First-Generation Student

To connect with the audience gathered in the main lecture hall, Richard Schrock opened with his personal history. Born in 1945 to a family of Swiss immigrants, he grew up in a small town in Indiana. On his eighth birthday, his second-eldest brother gave him a chemistry set as a present, sparking his interest in the subject. During his childhood, he continued to conduct his own experiments and to add to his collection of laboratory equipment. While his parents had to leave school at the age of 16 to work, Schrock recalls that it always felt natural to him to go to university: “We didn’t have a lot of money, but the University of California offered programs for students like me and I worked at the labs every summer.”

At the suggestion of his physical chemistry teacher, he applied to Harvard for graduate study and, to his great surprise and delight, got accepted. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 1971, Schrock worked at the research department of the DuPont chemical company. “However, I didn’t want to spend my career in the industry. I wanted to focus on basic research – even if it meant a cut in salary,” he explained. “I wanted to explore as many catalyst variations as possible in order to discover how specific products – out of the many possible results – can be made selectively.”

Groundwork for a New Fundamental Reaction

Joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, he continued his work on metal-olefin reactions, which he had started at DuPont, as an extension of his research on organometallic compounds. Olefins are hydrocarbon structures characterized by having at least one carbon-carbon double bond and are often used in the petrochemical industry. Metathesis is a chemical reaction that allows these double bonds to be broken and rearranged selectively at the same time as atomic groups change place.

By 1980, Schrock was able to show what type of tungsten species would metathesize olefins and in the mid-eighties, he succeeded in producing catalysts featuring tungsten- and molybdenum-based centers that effectively facilitated metathesis. For his work on “the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis,” he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005 with Yves Chauvin and Robert H. Grubbs. Recalling Alfred Nobel’s aim to award prizes for scientific discoveries contributing to the betterment of mankind, Schrock shared his belief that this could only be proven over the decades following the initial discovery.

From Basic Research to Industrial Application

In the mid-1990s, he started working with Amir Hoveyda on asymmetric metathesis and its potential applications. “Carbon-carbon bonds are abundant in nature and very important for many chemical products, such as drugs and fuels,” Schrock said. Thus, metathesis enabled the development of new processes that, decades later, could help make industrial chemistry more sustainable: for example, producing renewable chemicals from rapeseed oil methyl ester. By ‘chopping’ its 18-carbon chain into two ten-carbon chains using abundant ethylene gas, the chemists discovered one compound led to a yield of roughly 70 per cent – meaning that up to 70 per cent of the possible product was actually obtained. Proudly, Schrock shared how his student Smaranda Marinescu was able to build on his work and developed a catalyst with a selectivity of over 99 per cent and a yield of up to 95 per cent.

In 2010, he joined Hoveyda and other pioneers in metathesis to start the company XiMo, which had the goal of scaling up and making the catalysts commercially viable. Seven years later, it was acquired by Verbio AG, a German biofuel company interested in increasing the value of its operations. Based on the work at XiMo, new processes to produce bio-based chemicals from locally-sourced vegetable oil were developed – a topic close at hand in Dortmund, as the group of Dr. Thomas Seidensticker, who initiated the invitation of Schrock, similarly researches methods for the sustainable catalysis of chemicals from local, bio-based resources. Finally, on 6 October 2026, Verbio opened a plant for the ethenolysis of methyl oleate from rapeseed on a 60.000-ton scale per year in Bitterfeld, Saxony-Anhalt – using a catalyst based on Schrock’s fundamental research on olefin metathesis.

Following the lecture, the Nobel Prize laureate answered the audience’s numerous questions. Throughout the discussion, he stressed the importance of collaboration for scientific discoveries: “No one can do everything. I focused on olefins and double bonds, so someone else jumped on alkynes and triple bonds. That’s science! It takes time, many variations – and hard-working students.”

About the “Initial Spark” Lecture Series

In the 1860s, the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize, experimented with explosives in mining at Dorstfeld Colliery in Dortmund-Dorstfeld, among other places. To be able to detonate nitroglycerine more safely, he developed what is known as the “initial spark” in 1863. Taking its name from this experimental phase of Nobel’s work, the lecture series was initiated and supported from 2019–2025 by a donation of the Wilo Foundation to mark TU Dortmund University’s 50th anniversary.

Previous speakers have included Prof. Frances Arnold (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018), Prof. Erwin Neher (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1991), Prof. Benjamin List (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021), Prof. Reinhard Genzel (Nobel Prize in Physics 2020), Dr. Irina Scherbakowa (Nobel Peace Prize 2022 for Memorial, a human rights organization), Prof. Klaus von Klitzing (Nobel Prize in Physics 1985) and Prof. Stefan Hell (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014).