Richard F. Heck papers

Richard F. Heck (1931-2015), namesake of the Heck Reaction, was an American chemist awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactions.

Heck was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1931, but his family moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was eight years old. Richard Heck received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles (BS 1952 and PhD 1954). His doctoral work in physical organic chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Saul Winstein was followed by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Heck joined the Hercules Powder Co. in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1956, and was prompted by a colleague to "do something with transition metals." The nascent field of organotransition metal chemistry proved to be a worthy direction for Heck's research in "the way you can make all sorts of compounds."

Richard Heck accepted a faculty position in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware in 1971. The research he began in the 1960s resulted in the 1972 publication of "Palladium-catalyzed vinylic hydrogen substitution reactions with aryl, benzyl, and styryl halides" in the Journal of Organic Chemistry (J. Org. Chem. 37 (14): 2320–2322). This work came to be known as the Heck Reaction, foundational to the future of catalytic organometallic bond forming processes currently in use in modern organic synthesis. The Heck Reaction is also known as the "Mizoroki-Heck Reaction," after Tsutomu Mizoroki, who published about palladium catalyzed carbon coupling in 1971. Heck's 1972 publication acknowledged the 1971 Mizoroki publication but included independently discovered work.

Richard Heck rose to the honor of Willis F. Harrington Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, which he also held as Professor Emeritus after his retirement from the University of Delaware in 1989. Recognition of Heck's contributions to the field of chemistry continued in his retirement. In tribute to his career as a scientific innovator who made "outstanding contributions and advances in industrial applications of chemistry," Heck received the Wallace Carothers Award from the Delaware Section of the American Chemical Society in 2005. The American Chemical Society honored Heck's creative research in synthetic methods in 2006 with the Herbert C. Brown Award. In 2011, he received an honorary doctorate in pharmacy from Uppsala University, as well as an honorary doctorate in science from the University of Delaware. De La Salle University in Manila, the Philippines, bestowed an honorary doctorate of humanities on Richard Heck in 2012.

The pinnacle of these accolades, however, was the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was given to Heck and fellow laureates Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University) and Ei-Ichi Negishi (Purdue University) for their pioneering research in palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.

Richard Heck died on October 9, 2015, in Manila.

"Legacy of Richard Heck," ACS Select virtual issue, accessed December 3, 2018, https://pubs.acs.org/page/vi/heck-legacy?ref=orlef7Feature Richard F. Heck - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2018, accessed December 5, 2018, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2010/heck/biographical/ Richard F. Heck publications. Chemistry Tree, accessed December 3, 2018, https://academictree.org/chemistry/publications.php?pid=52395 "Honorary doctors of the Faculty of Pharmacy," Uppsala University, accessed December 3, 2018, https://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/traditions/prizes/honorary-doctorates/pharmacy/