Schrock, Richard Royce
Richard Royce Schrock, 1945–, American chemist, b. Berne, Ind., Ph.D Harvard, 1971. After working for three years with the Dupont Company, he became (1972) a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2005, Yves Chauvin, Robert H. Grubbs, and Schrock were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis. In metathesis reactions, double bonds between carbon atoms in different molecules are broken, and the separated atom groups form new double bonds, creating molecules in which the groups have changed places; the process may be represented schematically as AB + YZ → AY + BZ. Schrock was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee for being the first to develop an efficient catalyst for metathesis reactions.