William S Knowles

William Standish Knowles (Taunton, United States, June 1, 1917 – June 13, 2012) was an American chemist who was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Biography

He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942. He retired in 1986.

Scientific research

William S. Knowles discovered that it was possible to use so-called transition metals to make chiral catalysts in an important type of reaction called hydrogenation.

In 1968, while working for the Monsanto company in St. Louis, Knowles found a way to produce the benign variant of the amino acid Levodopa, which is used to treat Parkinson's disease.

In 2001 he was awarded, together with the Japanese Ryōji Noyori, half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their joint work on the hydrogenation reaction using chiral catalysts. The other half of the prize went to his compatriot Karl Barry Sharpless for achieving the same goal but by a different process, using in this case oxidation.