Taipei Tech had the pleasure of inviting the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dr. Ei-ichi Negishi from Purdue University, to come to our school and speak to us on his journey for the Nobel Prize.

Shortly before his speech, Dr. Negishi attended Taipei Tech’s Paradigm University Committee meeting. He advised that our school should look towards being the best and compare our university with technical schools beyond Taiwan and Asia, like MIT, Georgia Tech and ETH Zurich just to name a few. Being the best should be our standard, and we should believe that we have the capacity to compete at an international level with other world’s best technical schools. Dr. Negishi also mentioned that since we already have a well recognized electrical engineering department, we can also start to look at putting more emphasis on our chemistry department. The chemical component of a technical school should not be sidelined as chemistry is the base for many technological developments as well, which can subsequently improve our other departments.

Soon after the Committee meeting, Dr. Negishi made his way to the Chiang Kai-shek Auditorium for his keynote speech “The Nobel Journey through Chemistry – an intergenerational dialogue with Dr. Negishi”. The auditorium was fully packed with more than 200 students not only from Taipei Tech, but also high school students from Taipei First Girl High School(北一女)、The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University (師大附中)、National Panchiao High School(板橋中學). Dr. Negishi started off his speech by encouraging everyone to find their passion in life, pursue it, and that anybody can win a Nobel Prize. However if you want to achieve something and be good at what you do, you first have to qualify to succeed. In another words, if you want to win an Olympic medal in running, you have to qualify to run really fast. The mixture of academic and passion will be key to earning that success. Over the past 100 years, there are only 1000 Nobel Prize winners; the odds of winning are one in 10 million. But if you separate every effort towards success into steps, and every step has 1 out of 10 chances to succeed, you can reach your goal within 7 steps. With every effort, it’s another step towards your goal.

After graduating university, Dr. Negishi went to work in a polyester company. There was no one to teach him what to do, he had to be his own teacher. He soon comprehended the fact that most companies emphasize on applicability of rather than academic research; after coming up with a great research, if it’s not useful, it is deemed useless. It’s either a homerun or you are out. It was then he realized that his knowledge is not enough, therefore he went to further his studies abroad.

During his time studying in the United States, he met Professor Brown, who is also a Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1979. Professor Brown was a great mentor to Dr. Negishi; Brown taught him HOW to do research successfully, but not WHAT to do research on. Dr. Negishi then adapted a method of “systematic exploration” for chemistry. Through his explorations, he found that palladium is a useful transitional metal that can work as a catalyst. Palladium can be expensive, but as a transitional metal catalyst it can be reused infinitely to reduce its cost. It was this discovery of palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling that earned Dr. Negishi his Nobel Prize medal in 2010. He had created an influential tool for synthesizing a wide range of useful chemicals used in medicine, agriculture, and electronics. His ground breaking work is now widely used in the industry and researches in a variety of applications including: pharmaceutical antibiotics that work on drug resistant bacteria, agricultural chemicals that protect crops from fungi, and electronic light-emitting diodes used in the production of extremely thin monitors.

Dr. Negishi provided many good suggestions to both the improvement Taipei Tech and to the growth of our students. In short, both need to strive for excellence and think of ourselves to be the one in a thousand.