E. J. Corey

E. J. Corey is an American organic chemist who developed retrosynthetic analysis, a systematic method for planning how to synthesize a complex molecule that transformed the practice of organic chemistry. Rather than starting from available raw materials and trying to build a target molecule forward step by step, Corey's method works backward from the finished target molecule, methodically breaking it down, one carefully chosen bond at a time, into progressively simpler component pieces until the process arrives at simple, readily available starting materials, at which point the resulting sequence can be run forward as an actual practical synthesis. Corey and his research group used this approach, along with roughly fifty new or substantially improved chemical reactions they developed along the way, to successfully synthesize more than one hundred biologically important and structurally complex natural products, including prostaglandins, hormone-like compounds with important roles in the body, and leukotrienes, compounds involved in inflammatory and allergic responses, syntheses that had previously been considered impractical or impossible. Corey also pioneered the use of computers to assist retrosynthetic analysis, developing early software to help chemists systematically generate and evaluate possible synthetic routes to a target molecule, an approach that anticipated the much more extensive computer-assisted synthesis planning tools used in chemistry today. Corey was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis, and he spent the great majority of his long academic career as a professor at Harvard University.