The golden age of American productivity growth followed what is called the second industrial revolution, in 1860-1900, which yielded a cluster of genuinely paradigm-shifting inventions: electric power, the internal combustion engine, modern industrial chemistry and telecommunications.

ECONOMIST: Performing miracles | The

The fact that people have used industrial chemistry to short-circuit the nitrogen cycle, by making fertilisers out of nitrogen in the air at a rate which greatly exceeds what natural systems can manage, has real environmental effects.

ECONOMIST: The global environment

Since an awful lot of industrial chemistry is catalysed this way, and the chemical industry lies, one way or another, at the base of most manufacturing, there is a good argument that this is the most important prize of the lot.

ECONOMIST: The 2007 Nobel science prizes

In the past year, for example, Dr Seddon and Tom Welton, a chemist at Imperial College London, have shown that one of the most important and difficult processes in industrial organic chemistry, the Diels-Alder reaction (which links carbon atoms together and thus allows big molecules to be assembled) can work better in ionic than in conventional solvents.

ECONOMIST: Ionic solvent

As they report in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, the researchers found that several pestilential organisms were affected by the oil.

ECONOMIST: Tobacco extracts protect plants from pests and pathogens

Goodfellow, 51, hopes to reverse this catastrophic fall in productivity by combining genomics, biology, chemistry and the latest industrial automation to reengineer the drug discovery process, even in its earliest phases.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Several companies are already seeking to take advantage of the new field, called synthetic biology, which combines chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology to breed industrial life forms that can secrete fuels, vaccines or other commercial products.

WSJ: Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell

Before being plucked from obscurity, he had enjoyed a respectable career as a chemistry teacher (sulphur dioxide was his speciality) at a technical university in the grim industrial south.

ECONOMIST: Jerzy Buzek, doughty but adrift