John Hartwig, chemist: ‘The situation for science in the United States is terrible, these are the steps of authoritarian regimes to take power’

The most famous scientists are usually those who investigate existential questions, such as physicists who study black holes or theories of gravity, or those who solve medical problems, like the creators of the Covid-19 vaccines or those searching for cancer treatments. There is another group of researchers, however, who have an even greater impact on our daily lives than these famous scientists, but tend to go unnoticed. The chemist John Hartwig, 60, from the University of California, Berkeley forms part of this little-heralded legion.

Hartwig just received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for the fundamental advances he’s made in the field of catalysis. Although the achievement may sound esoteric, his work has made it possible to control and accelerate chemical reactions that have led to the production of drugs used for the treatment of HIV, hepatitis and depression that would have been previously impossible. As he himself estimates in a video call from California, “the field of catalysis gives rise to something like 30% of the U.S. GDP, and I assume that’s true for essentially every developed nation.”

In the world of chemistry, some reactions are too slow or too difficult and require the assistance of metals that act as catalysts to accelerate them. One of the advances Hartwig has contributed to is homogeneous catalysis, where the catalysts and reagents are in the same phase, typically liquid, allowing for more precise and efficient reactions.

One of Hartwig’s major achievements has been developing catalysts capable of breaking the carbon-hydrogen bonds, which are very stable and difficult to modify. These bonds are abundant in organic molecules, but their stability made them of little use for drug synthesis.

Hartwig and his team managed to convert these bonds into carbon-boron (C-B) bonds, a key transformation because boron acts as a chemical hook, allowing for the efficient assembly of complex molecules. Today, these reactions are used in the production of antiviral drugs and treatments for pancreatic and lung cancer.

Hartwig says one of the most surprising aspects of the process has been how it has come to be used on a large scale. “A reaction was run on a thousand pounds to make a molecule that’s going into clinical trials with Amgen for solid tumors,” he says. His chemical findings have also been applied to electronic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which are used in the screens of cell phones and high-end televisions.

Question. How do you view the state of research in the United States after the first months of Donald Trump as president?

Answer. The situation for science in the U.S. is terrible. How should I put this because I don’t want to make everybody flee our country, but I do think it needs to be clear to the public. They’re not funding grants from the National Institutes of Health, including in backdoor ways, like blocking committees from meeting that make decisions about the grants. I have three post-doctoral students who have fellowship applications that are not even being reviewed.

I also have a $3.5 million grant that was recommended for funding, for plastics recycling. There’s been a “communications pause.” I don’t know if it’ll still go forward, or maybe it never gets funded. [If that happens] we wouldn’t have the opportunity to try to pursue the commercial viability of this chemical recycling that we developed and that others would be able to contribute to.

The universities are also losing money due to things that have nothing to do with their science program, over whether they had some students who protested in the Gaza-Israel situation. It’s really frightening for me to see that, as someone who has worked for 30 years in science in the United States. The idea of cutting so much support for research is alarming. Science and innovation have been our signature. The future economy depends on the discoveries that are made.

Those discoveries can be made in a university, or they can be made in industry, but the people in industry who made those discoveries went to universities and got advanced degrees in the sciences and then went off and started the new biotech company that discovers a drug that gets developed into affecting human health. That is how the whole economy works.

Companies such as Google and many others in the technology sector rely on people trained in these institutions. If we pull the plug on training, where’s the United States’ position as a technology leader? There’s this feeling: these are the kinds of steps of authoritarian regimes to take power. And we’re just watching it happen. How do we stop this?

Q. What do you think about the influence of artificial intelligence in your field?

A. We have a project with Merck to develop ways to use artificial intelligence to predict what a catalyst will do. There have been amazing advances in computational chemistry. People can calculate what the structures of molecules will be, what the energy barrier will be, for a reaction to occur. But those calculations, while really valuable, they take a lot of time, and they take a lot of computer power. So we and others in the field have been trying to figure out whether we could combine it with machine learning to be able to make predictions about catalysts. It’s an area that is in its infancy, but we’ve seen this incredible rise of machine learning in all aspects of our lives. So could that also be true for chemistry?

The Holy Grail, which nobody’s accomplished yet, is to be able to use generative AI to predict a catalyst that would do some transformation that hasn’t been done or to carry out a selective reaction on something that hasn’t been done. I think there’s potential. I’m convinced that there will be a big impact on the future, but exactly what the impact is, is hard to predict.

Q. What about its uses for the environment? You are working with plastics that are easier to recycle.

A. We call it chemical recycling. Most of the recycling that we do today is what we call mechanical recycling. You take plastics, you grind them up and then you melt and reform an object. But most of what we make by that is material of much lower value. For example, you take something that’s a packaging or some plastic toy that has certain properties, and it all gets mixed together, ground up and reformed. But usually that’s good for deck furniture or the flooring of a plastic deck, simulated wood, but not something you would store your food in or a nice clear piece of plastic.

What we’ve been trying to do is figure out ways that you can take those plastics and deconstruct them. Polyethylene and polypropylene are the ones we’ve worked on, they’re the largest-volume plastics. Together they make up over half of the plastics that get made. But they’re very stable, so we’ve been interested in ways to cleave those bonds in a selective way.

We recently published a study that shows how you could take polyethylene and ethylene and make propylene. You take a polyethylene, a long chain that’s thousands of carbons long, and chop it into pieces and eventually get all the way back to a three-carbon unit that we use to make polypropylene, which is one of the largest-volume plastics. We’re hoping that we can take that further and over time, develop it into something that would be commercially viable.

Q. Do you believe that solutions to climate change can be achieved through scientific innovations, or is it still a problem with a greater social dimension?

A. That’s hard for me to say. I know a reasonable amount about it, but making a real prediction requires people who are very good at techno-economic analyses and life-cycle analyses. But I would say that many of the technological solutions are going to require chemical findings. Take the example of windmills. Not the ones in Holland from hundreds of years ago, but the new ones, which have huge plastic blades. The amount of force and time they need to stay out there is a really big material science problem. When those blades fail at some point, you need to replace them. You need to find a way to recycle them or make use of them. That’s a place where new materials would be made by new chemistry. Another example is making vehicles lighter. If we could replace metal with lighter materials so they’re lighter-weight, this would improve energy efficiency. And if we could turn carbon dioxide into a fuel in a practical way, that would have a big impact.

At the same time, we have to change behavior. It’s difficult. I flew here, to San Diego. I’m going to fly today to Tennessee and then I’m going to fly home. If we can change behaviors, that’s going to be a major contributor.

Q. We need technological and lifestyle changes.

A. Climate change is a complex problem. When you think about the scale of things — fossil fuels are used 10 times more than chemicals. You’re worried about a lightweight plastic bag, but you burn a gallon of gas going to the grocery store and back.

Q. If you were a young researcher, what field would you find most interesting or exciting?

A. I think there are very interesting directions in combining chemistry with enzymes, these chemo-enzymatic approaches to synthesis. There are some very successful young people in that area, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. It’s not going to take over everything, but there’s a contribution there.

Applying AI to chemical discovery is certainly another important area. But what we tend to see is that there will be a new faculty member — or even an old one, like me — who does something that makes you go, ‘Wow, I never would have thought of that.’ Or there will be something that was done many years ago that got abandoned and gets brought back. One example of this is photochemistry, using heat and light to drive chemical reactions. In recent years, this field has experienced tremendous growth.

When we started in the work that we were recognized for with this award, people thought it was very niche, something that was going to be used in special cases, kind of as a last resort in the synthesis of organic molecules. But it’s become completely mainstream. It’s hard to predict the future. But in general, I continue to believe in the importance of combining different disciplines.

Q. What have been the developments in your field that have most surprised you?

A. When we started working, there were two different types of reactions that people commonly used, and there was a very fundamental step of a reaction that no one had previously observed. To explain it simply: in a catalytic reaction, you add a small amount of a catalyst, and it can make a large amount of product. We call it turnovers: the number of molecules that the reaction makes versus the number of catalyst molecules that are in there. It can be very high, because the reaction goes in a loop. The catalyst will start taking one of the reactants, do something with that, take a second reactant, do something with that, pair them together, and then release the product and become what it was originally. It’s a circle, with different steps. In the beginning, we were interested in just one of those steps. Nobody had seen that step before. And I thought, I could get tenure if I was able to find examples of that step.

That step became part of a catalytic reaction. Nobody envisioned how commonly used it would become. That reaction has become the most widely used reaction discovered in 40 years in homogeneous catalysis. We first ran that reaction, we tried it out on a very simple molecule, it had nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. But over 20 years of advances, one step at a time, we’ve gotten to a point where it’s become very widely used.

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