German Ertl wins 2007 Nobel for chemistry

STOCKHOLM: German Gerhard Ertl won the Nobel Prize for chemistry on his 71st birthday on Wednesday for work which helped to develop cleaner car exhaust systems and explain the depletion of the ozone layer.   

The Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarding the 10 million crown ($1.54 million) prize, said Ertl's work on surface chemistry highlighted specific reactions -- such as the formation of ammonia in the manufacture of chemical fertiliser -- and laid the foundations for an entire field of research.   

"His insights have provided the scientific basis of modern surface chemistry: his methodology is used in both academic research and the industrial development of chemical processes."   

Scientists said his work had hastened the development of new catalysts which are useful in cleaning up car exhaust emissions and making fertilisers and drugs. Ertl is the former director of the Fritz-Haber Institute at Berlin''s Max-Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.   

He told Swedish radio the biggest surprise was that he did not share the prize with any other scientists. "I was just sitting at my desk and working on revisions of a handbook I am just editing," he said of the moment he learned he had won a Nobel. "It is the culmination of the life of a scientist. It is a dream. And of course I still have to really convince myself that it's true."   

Born in a suburb of Stuttgart on Oct. 10 1936, Ertl has been honoured in the past, winning the Japan Prize in 1992 as well as the Wolf Prize in Chemistry six years later.    "He worked out how you go about studying chemical reactions on a scale where you have a single layer of gas molecules stuck to a solid surface," said Mark Peplow, editor of Royal Society of Chemistry publication Chemistry World.   

"Without understanding how solid catalysts can speed up the chemical reactions of gases, it would have taken much longer and been extremely difficult to develop new catalysts which are useful, for example in cleaning up your car exhaust or a wide range of processes to make things like fertilizers and drugs."   

The Nobel committee said surface chemistry could help explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere.   

The science also helps people to understand why iron rusts and is useful in the semiconductor industry, it added. This was the third of this year's crop of prestigious Nobel prizes handed out each year for distinction in science, literature, economics and peace.   

The prizes bearing the name of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the 1895 will of the Swedish businessman.