Richard F. Heck (1931-2015)

American chemist born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Working at the Hercules company in the late 1960s, he studied the reactions of arylpalladium compounds with alkenes; in 1972 he described the catalytic version with aryl halides, the Heck reaction.

He was professor at the University of Delaware until his retirement in 1989. He received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, and spent his last years in the Philippines.

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