Bernard Feringa

Bernard Feringa (born May 18, 1951, Barger-Compascuum, Netherlands) is a Dutch chemist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with molecular machines. He shared the prize with French chemist Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Scottish-American chemist Sir J. Fraser Stoddart.

Feringa received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Groningen in 1978. That year he became a research chemist for the oil company Royal Dutch Shell in Amsterdam. He was at the Shell Biosciences Laboratories in Sittingbourne, England, from 1982 to 1983. Feringa then returned to Shell in Amsterdam, and in 1984 he became a lecturer in organic chemistry at Groningen. He was appointed a professor there in 1988.

In 1999 Feringa and collaborators announced that they had created the first “molecular motor”—that is, a molecule that can be made to spin in one direction. Usually, when molecules rotate, they are as equally likely to spin one way as the other. The molecular motor was made of two “blades,” in which one blade would spin 180 degrees when exposed to ultraviolet light. This rotation would set up a “tension” in the bond that connects the two blades that would cause the other blade to rotate. Each blade had a methyl group connected to it that acted as a ratchet so rotation could only happen in one direction. The Feringa group built molecular motors that rotated faster and faster, which culminated in 2013 with the development of one that rotated with a frequency of 12 MHz.

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The Feringa group used molecular motors in more ambitious projects. In 2005 they were able to spin with molecular motors a glass cylinder that was 28 micrometres long, 10,000 times larger than the motors. In 2011 they created a “nanocar,” which consisted of a “chassis” and four molecular motors for wheels and which could drive over a surface.