The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Benjamin List and David MacMillan for developing a new method for building molecules.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work had advanced pharmaceutical research and "made chemistry greener."

List and MacMillan, working independently of each other, had developed a new type of catalyst to accelerate chemical reactions called asymmetric organocatalysis.

Such catalysts are essential in molecular construction, the academy said.

"This concept for catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we didn’t think of it earlier," says Johan Aqvist, who is chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Last year, the chemistry prize went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 method of genome editing.

dpa