Elias James Corey

Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928, Methuen, Mass., U.S.) is an American chemist, director of a research group that developed syntheses of scores of complicated organic molecules and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his original contributions to the theory and methods of organic synthesis.

Early life and education

Corey was the fourth child of Elias Corey and Fatina Corey (née Hashan). His father died 14 months after the birth, prompting his mother to change the young child’s name from William to Elias. Despite the hardships that were imposed by the Great Depression, Corey was raised in a happy hardworking household that included his mother’s sister and her husband, both of whom functioned as second parents. Corey went to a Roman Catholic elementary school in nearby Lawrence and graduated from Lawrence Public High School in 1945. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) a few weeks later with an interest in electrical engineering. He soon became enamoured with chemistry, though, because of its intellectual richness and its relevance to human health. He focused on synthetic organic chemistry after taking a course on the subject from Arthur Cope in 1947. Corey obtained an undergraduate degree in 1948 and continued at MIT as a graduate student working on synthetic penicillins in the research group of John Sheehan. Corey completed his doctoral studies in late 1950, in time to accept a position the following January as an instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he came under the influence of the noted organic chemists Roger Adams and Carl Marvel.

Career path

Corey began working on his own at Illinois by applying theories of electron density in molecules and transition states (known as molecular orbital theory) to make predictions about reaction products. Then, upon promotion to assistant professor in 1954, came the opportunity of supervising graduate students, and Corey established a research group to pursue a wide range of experimental projects involving the structure, stereochemistry, and synthesis of complex naturally occurring organic compounds. He achieved such success that he was promoted to full professor in 1956, at age 27. With the aid of a Guggenheim fellowship, Corey took a sabbatical in the fall of 1957. He went first to Harvard University at the invitation of the world’s best synthetic chemist, Robert B. Woodward, and then to Switzerland, England, and finally Sweden, where he was a guest of biochemist Sune Bergström. In 1959 he returned to Harvard, where he became a member of one of the world’s leading chemistry departments. In 1965 he became chairman of the department and was appointed Sheldon Emory Professor of Organic Chemistry.

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Retrosynthetic analysis

In October 1957, Corey began to shape his many ideas on chemical synthesis into a coherent strategy that became known as retrosynthetic analysis. At that time the traditional way of designing laboratory syntheses of complicated organic molecules, utilized brilliantly by several chemists around the world, was to begin with simple (or at least readily available) building blocks that could be assembled by a sequence of reactions to form the desired target molecule.

Corey, on the other hand, planned his syntheses by theoretically breaking the target molecule into parts from which it could likely be made and then continuing the disassembly process until simple starting materials were arrived at. By retrosynthetic analysis each target molecule could be disassembled into several different synthetic schemes, every step of which was based on known reactions of related molecules. A combination of intelligent selection and experimental trial and error could then be applied to achieve a successful synthesis of the target molecule. This synthetic strategy subsequently became the norm for organic synthesis.

Before Corey, synthetic chemists had generally incorporated a certain amount of retrosynthetic insight into their reaction sequences, but none had made retrosynthetic thinking the core strategy of his syntheses.

Corey went on to pioneer the use of computers in retrosynthetic analysis to generate potential synthetic pathways, and such computer-assisted synthetic analysis has become widespread.

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Other achievements

Through intelligent application of retrosynthetic techniques, Corey’s research group achieved successful syntheses of more than 100 natural products of widely differing and complex structural types. In the late 1960s, he synthesized a series of biochemically important molecules, the prostaglandins, and in the 1970s he followed with the leukotrienes, a group of biologically active fatty acids. Another remarkable achievement was the synthesis in 1988 of ginkgolide B, a substance found in trace amounts in the roots of the ginkgo tree that is responsible for the medicinal effects of a Chinese folk medicine employing ginkgo extract.

In 1989, in collaboration with Cheng Xue-Min, Corey published full details of his synthetic methodology and techniques in The Logic of Chemical Synthesis. The following year Corey was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

In order to achieve the laboratory syntheses of target molecules, Corey’s research group also developed dozens of original reagents and synthetic reactions, together with several molecules that have many of the properties of catalytic enzymes. Corey dubbed such valuable molecules molecular robots because of their ability to repetitively add molecular fragments in structurally predetermined ways.