Figure: Ei-ichi Negishi receiving the news that he had won a share of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Image credit: Purdue University.

Prof. Ei-ichi Negishi, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on June 6, 2021 at age 85. He died of pneumonia following surgery. He was surrounded by his two daughters and their families, his caregiver, and a minister. As his daughter, Charlotte Negishi East, wrote to me, “It was a beautiful time…read[ing] scripture from [the] Japanese Bible and… such meaningful songs and prayers, many stories about our father…some were very funny, and we were able to laugh during this extremely sad time…until he died peacefully surrounded by loved ones.”

Prof. Negishi was born July 14, 1935, in what is now Changchun, China, while at the time of his birth it was called Hsinking. That was the capital of the Japanese occupied territory of Manchukuo. His family eventually moved to a town outside Tokyo after World War II, where his parents were farmers raising their five children. Although academically unmotivated as a child, Negishi’s abounding competitive spirit caused him to battle for the top academic spot in his school, just out of his passion to excel over others. That opened the door for him to attend the University of Tokyo. Negishi was then awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1958 to study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his doctorate in 1963 doing organosulfur chemistry. Negishi was a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University under Prof. H. C. Brown, who later received the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the hydroboration reaction. Brown was the only mentor that Negishi ever mentioned. The two became close friends and Negishi modeled his own chemistry around the methodical approach that he learned from Brown.

James M. Tour, PNAS August 31 2021

See more: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/35/e2113149118