J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a child to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2016, died on December 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82 years old.
Alison Margaret Stoddart, her daughter, said she died of cardiac arrest in a hotel while visiting her other daughter, Fiona Jane McCubbin.
Dr. Stoddart and his colleagues, Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France and Bernard L. Feringa of the Netherlands, first discovered how to build molecules with physical, rather than chemical, bonds. Those molecules could move freely and became the building blocks of nanomachines. The most basic ones, called catenanes, are interconnected molecules, like the links in a chain. They were first synthesized by Dr. Sauvage in 1983.
In 1991, Dr. Stoddart and his team took the next big step: They created molecules called rotaxanes, which have ring-like molecules wrapped around other dumbbell-shaped molecules. The ring molecule slides back and forth on the handlebars, the ends of which prevent the ring molecule from slipping off. (The word rotaxane comes from Latin roots meaning wheel and axle.)
Dr. Stoddart went on to figure out how to slide the ring molecules between two fixed points, like a miniature switch, and then how to put three rotaxanes together to create a platform that could rise and fall 0.7 billionths of a meter – basically a molecular elevator.
Since those early successes, scientists have been able to build molecular machines that contract and extend, replicating the actions of muscles; tiny propellers driven by light energy; and, in 2011, a small four-wheel-drive molecular car, just a few billionths of a meter long.
These devices have so far little practical application. But in announcing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences compared their potential to that of an earlier revolution.
“In terms of development,” the Academy said, “the molecular motor is at the same stage as the electric motor was in the 1830s, when scientists demonstrated various cranks and spinning wheels, unaware that they would lead to electric trains , washing machines, etc. fans and food processors.
Dr Feringa said one very likely application would be small robots that doctors could inject into patients to seek out and destroy cancer cells or to administer drugs.
Dr. Stoddart has also used his experience to try to find solutions to other problems.
In 2021, he co-founded H2MOF, a hydrogen storage and transportation company, with Omar Yaghi, another prominent chemist. Hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is notoriously difficult to transport and store. The company uses a technology, based on molecular materials developed by Dr. Stoddart and Dr. Yaghi, which allows hydrogen to be stored and transported in a solid state at room temperature and low pressure. This technology could help make hydrogen a more practical source of clean energy.
And in 2019, Dr. Stoddart introduced a skincare brand called Noble Panacea, based on porous organic nanovessels developed by him and some of his students. The containers are said to protect skincare products from deterioration or contamination due to light, oxygen and water, making them more efficient.
“I guess it goes without saying that I’m not your typical skincare brand founder,” Dr. Stoddart told Vogue. “A decade ago, my team and I didn’t specifically think about discovering technology with skincare applications. But inventing things with the goal of having a positive impact on people has always been my intention.”
James Fraser Stoddart was born on 24 May 1942 in Edinburgh. He was the only son of Thomas Fraser Stoddart, a tenant farmer, and Jane (Fortune) Stoddart, who owned a small hotel in Dunbar before her marriage.
The family moved to a farm called Edgelaw, just south of Edinburgh, when James was six months old, and lived there until he was 25. They raised crops and livestock, but had no electricity. During the cold winters, the family often gathered in the kitchen to keep warm. In his Nobel biography, Dr Stoddart called it “a very simple lifestyle”.
Among his few diversions were Meccano sets, model building sets popular in Britain at the time, which he could use to build gadgets. He also became a mechanic; he learned to dismantle car and tractor engines to clean them, repair them and then reassemble them.
When he was 8, he moved from his small village school to Stewart’s Melville College, an elite boys’ school in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he concentrated on mathematics and science, including organic chemistry. During his third year, his professor hired him to be part of a research team studying the structural intricacies of acacia plant gums. This set him on his path.
He graduated in 1964 and then completed his doctorate. in two years.
While at Edinburgh University, he met a brilliant fellow student named Norma Scholan. They married in 1968 and had two daughters. Fiona and Alison followed in their parents’ footsteps, gaining first-class honors and doctorates in chemistry, Fiona from Imperial College London and Alison from Cambridge University.
Norma Stoddart died in 2004. In addition to his daughters, Dr. Stoddart leaves behind four nephews and a niece.
Dr. Stoddart did postdoctoral research at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, then returned to England to work as a research fellow at the University of Sheffield. He joined the faculty in 1970.
In 1978 he was hired as a researcher by Imperial Chemical Industries, a British chemical company specializing in the production of herbicides. It was there that he began to imagine how it would be possible to build molecules with physical bonds. In his Nobel interview, he said he got the idea partly from the characteristics of the chemicals the company uses to make its fertilizers.
Until then, researchers had tried to synthesize catenanes by “matching similar types of chemicals.” The success rate was less than 1%. But the herbicide plant successfully combined ingredients from different families of chemicals, and Dr. Stoddart realized that this might be the key to designing catenanes.
He had the right idea, but it was still difficult, and Dr. Stoddart and his colleagues faced skepticism from other scientists who doubted that nanomachines were even possible. It would be another decade before they succeeded.
After three years at ICI, Dr Stoddart returned to Sheffield, where he continued his research.
In 1990 he was hired by the University of Birmingham, where he first synthesized a rotaxane. In 1997, he accepted a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2008 he was hired by Northwestern University, which created a nanotechnology research institute, the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group, in his honor.
In 2023, he was recruited by the University of Hong Kong. He was working there when he died.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Stoddart received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2007. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006.
During his career, Dr. Stoddart has guided and supervised the doctorates and research of more than 400 students from 43 countries. But he treated them more like partners than acolytes.
“I realized that you put a team together and allow the brains of 30 people to work on something rather than a top-down approach where you say I have all the ideas and these are just hands or slaves “he said. he said in his Nobel interview. He added: “I’m rebelling against the hierarchical system that visited me in the early part of my career, and I said I wouldn’t go down that path. I will model something new and make it possible for young people with extraordinary talent to express their creativity.