“Out of the few (a little over 100) chemical elements, in the field of catalysis, gold was neglected until the end of the past millenium.”

In homogeneous catalysis, gold catalysts have become a really hot topic in the past two years. When we joined the field in 2000 with our first two papers in Angewandte Chemie and Journal of the American Chemical Society, (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 2000, 39, 2285-2288, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2000, 122, 11553-11554), less than 100 papers on that subject had ever been published while only around a dozen groups had contributed. Our success attracted the attention of many other groups, probably especially the review in Gold Bulletin. In the meantime more than 40 groups worldwide are intensively working on homogeneous gold-catalyzed reactions and have published papers, many of them citing our publication in Gold Bulletin.

It summarizes the new developments in homogeneous catalysis by gold which were initiated by our work from the year 2000 and which probably inspired many other researchers to also try gold. Prior to this, most chemists were probably blocked by psychological barriers: it was assumed that gold is very expensive—which is not true, other technically used metals are significantly more expensive—and that gold is inert (which also is not true).

Chemistry explains how the million different forms of matter surrounding us (which indeed are all chemical compounds), and all their different properties, are based on a little over 100 basic building blocks called chemical elements. Catalysis allows manipulations of one form of matter to another—so-called chemical reactions—to take place under milder conditions (for example less energy-consuming) and with higher selectivity (whereby waste is avoided). Out of these few chemical elements, in the field of catalysis, gold was neglected until the end of the past millennium. This was based on a prejudice that gold was thought to be too expensive and unreactive, which both turned out to be untrue. We initiated significant activity in the field of homogeneous gold catalysis (the catalyst is dissolved during the reaction) by the publication of two articles in the year 2000. The publication in Gold Bulletin summarizes this and obviously inspired many others—now over 40 groups worldwide have joined us in investigating such reactions. New chemical reactions have been discovered that will probably influence the production of important chemical compounds such as pharmaceuticals in the future.

We were working on homogeneous catalysts and wanted to test a metal of the copper triade with a d8 configuration similar to palladium(II). Since the stability of the oxidation state of transition metals increases when going from the first to the third row of transition metals, we decided to test gold(III). When checking the literature, we became aware that this element has barely been investigated in homogeneous catalysis, which did not prevent us from trying it. This led to exciting new results, the outcome being that most of my group is now working on this subject.