Finally, it is not possible to discount the component of intellectual creativity for such inventions. To quote George Bernard Shaw, “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” Chemists looking at their universe often see that some parts are missing, and they set out to create them. For example, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Herbert Brown and Georg Wittig in 1979 for the invention of new types of useful transformations that were unprecedented in nature. This effort to create goes beyond chemical reactions and extends to molecules and organized molecular systems that originate in the imagination of an individual chemist.

A Nobel Prize to Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernest O. Fisher in 1973 recognized their creation, and understanding, of a new class of substances—unrelated to anything found in nature—called metallocenes. Originally, these organometallic sandwich compounds (and their “open-faced” versions) were of interest purely as new occupants of the chemical universe, as if a new type of planet had been created in the astronomical universe. However, some versions of such sandwich compounds have been shown more recently to act as catalysts for very significant reactions, and they are now applied in the manufacturing of polymers.

Synthetic inspiration can come from an attempt to make drastic improvements in the properties of existing substances. For example, some metals and metal compounds become superconducting at extremely low temperatures. Superconductors are attractive materials because they conduct electricity without any loss caused by resistance below a characteristic transition temperature, although above that temperature they are poor electrical conductors (and some are even insulators). More practical, high-temperature superconductors, first developed by Johannes G. Bednorz and Karl A. Muller, a mineralogist and a physicist, have great current and potential uses throughout science, including chemistry and chemical engineering. For example, most modern nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments have electromagnets wound with superconducting wires. Once an electric current is started in the wires, the source of electricity is disconnected, and the current keeps flowing as long as the temperature is kept very low by cooling the magnet with liquid helium. There is a great effort to invent new materials that would be superconducting at higher and more easily attained temperatures. Recently chemists and other scientists have been able to create new superconducting materials based on inorganic ceramics, which have considerably higher superconducting transition temperatures than the materials of Bednorz and Muller.

Since synthesis is such a central part of chemistry and chemical engineering, many other Nobel Prizes have recognized synthetic achievements. For example, a Nobel Prize in 1990 went to Elias J. Corey both for his contributions to the development of theory and methodology in organic synthesis and his application of them to the synthesis of important biologically active substances. It also recognized his formalization, and even computerization, of the strategies that successful multistep syntheses follow. Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta received a Nobel