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【人物访谈】催化的魅力
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Interview: The fascination of catalysis
02 November 2007
Ferdi Schüth talks to Madelaine Chapman about rockets, catalysis and law.
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Ferdi Schüth is a professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. His research focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of inorganic materials which have a use in catalysis. He is a member of the Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics advisory editorial board. |
Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?
There was a fellow student in high school when I was 11 years old who went out after New Year, when we have rockets and fireworks in Germany, and collected the empty shells. We filled them with black powder and then tried to make them go again. We never got them to fly. They just exploded, but that was fun. Ever since then I wanted to be a chemist.
Did you do other experiments when you were younger?
Yes, you could buy little chemistry sets and could get quite a number of chemicals in the pharmacies. You could buy sulphur and potassium nitrate, so you could make black powder. I had a little table in the cellar of our house and I did my experiments down there.
What did your parents think of your experiments?
I started out doing the experiments in the kitchen but I was banned to the cellar when I produced hydrogen sulfide. But they were happy, even if they were sometimes concerned that I was going to blow up the house! They encouraged and supported me and told me chemistry was a great career choice.
How did you become interested in catalysis?
I wasn't interested in a particular topic, so I selected an advisor to work with, who happened to do catalysis. For my habilitation, I worked with Professor Klaus Unger in Mainz, who is an inorganic chemist. I find this combination of inorganic/materials chemistry with catalysis really enjoyable. My career path involved many chance decisions which, in hindsight, turned out to be wonderful. Now I tell my students: 'don't plan too much.' My grandmother always said the one who plans early has to plan twice. There is a lot of wisdom in that.
What part of your research are you most proud of so far?
In 1992, I had an idea to stick a molecule into a zeolite channel. I proposed that if I had a single crystal of a zeolite, I should be able to analyse the orientation of the molecule in the zeolite with polarised infrared radiation using an infrared microscope. Infrared microscopes had just been introduced one year before. I wrote a proposal for this microscope which was granted. The very first day of experiments provided the spectra for a good paper. The fact that the idea immediately and directly worked made me very proud. Normally that never happens. Normally you have an idea but it fails and takes three times as long as you think.
I am also proud of a field we have developed over the last few years - the analysis of silicate species and the development of different species with mass spectrometry. This was much more complex and it certainly did not work straight away.
You are involved in the application of high throughput experimentation to catalysis. How is this field progressing?
The field, which allows us to quickly screen a large number of catalysts, is pretty mature although it's only about 10 years old. The development of cutting-edge technology has moved into companies and is less of an academic topic nowadays. But there are still aspects of it where there are big challenges. In biotechnology, scientists do computational screening of molecule libraries. We would benefit greatly if we applied similar technology to materials science, especially catalysis. Even with the most powerful high-throughput techniques, it's not possible to explore all possible new catalysts experimentally. Developing computational methods to narrow down the search is one of the biggest challenges we have.
Can these techniques be used to gain physical insight into what's actually happening in a catalytic reaction?
Absolutely. Normally if we want to get insight, we measure the performance of different catalysts, we analyse catalyst composition, structure and so on and then we build models and try to derive structure-activity relationships. Thanks to high-throughput experimentation, we have more catalysts and more characterisation data and so the database from which we are establishing these relationships is a much wider one. Consequently, we can either get insight into these structure-activity relationships more quickly or we can get deeper insight because we see more.
What is the secret to running a successful research group?
My belief is that people working with me should have freedom. They have to think for themselves. I also strongly believe that people have to have fun at work. They have to like what they are doing. When I hire new people I am always looking for a fire burning in them. They need to be fascinated by the chemistry. I also think you need material resources. You can only go so far with just ideas - at some point you need steel and glass.
If you weren't a scientist, what would you do?
I would probably be a judge. I have both a law degree and a chemistry PhD. I had several different career possibilities - industrial chemist, patent lawyer, academic or judge - and I weighed up all their pros and cons. The ones that scored highest were an academic chemist and a judge in administration law.
Related Links
Ferdi Schüth's page at the Max-Planck-Institut
Read more about Ferdi Schüth's work here
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-3913-10181.html
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