Akira Suzuki life and biography

Akira Suzuki is a Japanese chemist and Nobel Prize Laureate (2010), who first published the Suzuki reaction, the organic reaction of an aryl- or vinyl-boronic acid with an aryl- or vinyl-halide catalyzed by a palladium(0) complex, in 1979.

Prior to the development of palladium-catalyzed cross coupling technique, carbon chains had been difficult to construct in the lab, but when palladium is used as an intermediary these links can be constructed quite easily, which has led to the adaption of palladium-catalyzed cross couplings across many disciplines of chemistry. Palladium bonds to carbon atoms without complex inducement, bringing these atoms into closer proximity and triggering to the next step in the reaction, where the carbon atoms break away from the palladium and, in the immediate aftermath, bond to each other in chains.

Japanese chemist Akira Suzuki and his colleague, Norio Miyaura, developed what is now termed the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction, or "Suzuki coupling", in 1981. A chemical reaction that employs boronic acids or esters, Suzuki coupling is a form of palladium-catalyzed cross couplings, distinct in that it uses organoborons. Suzuki was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2010, shared with Richard F. Heck and Ei-ichi Negishi, who conducted earlier but related research into palladium-catalyzed cross couplings.

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