William Standish Knowles (1917-2012)

American chemist. He spent his whole career at the Monsanto company in St. Louis (Missouri). In the late 1960s he used chiral phosphines in Wilkinson’s hydrogenation catalyst and obtained the first appreciable enantiomeric excesses in a catalytic hydrogenation.

With the diphosphine DIPAMP he developed the industrial synthesis of L-DOPA, in operation from 1974: it was the first industrial process based on asymmetric catalysis. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ryōji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless.

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