A US and two Japanese scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing a chemical research tool known as “palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling.” Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki invented the tool to allow scientists to build chemicals that can aid in the production of pharmaceuticals and electronics. Nobel committee member Astrid Gräslund compared it to a Lego toy.

Astrid Gräslund: “It is about joining carbon atoms together in a way that you want to do. So if you want to say it in very simple words, you could say it’s like building a Lego toy, and you want to join two pieces together and you want to decide how and what to do with them, so this is what this reaction does. You decide, and it simply performs for your chemical reaction.”