The curious incident of the catalytic amine that never was

‘I heard about it within a few hours of it coming out and immediately thought, well, that’s nonsense, that’s palladium,’ says Robin Bedford from the University of Bristol, UK.

Bedford is talking about a Nature Catalysis study published in early 2021 by Hai-Zhu Yu and Hua-Jian Xu and co-workers.¹ They showed that a simple amine catalyst can replace palladium in one of chemistry’s most common carbon–carbon bond-forming reactions: cross coupling. Had it been right, it would have been paradigm shifting, says Bedford. ‘It would change what is a Nobel prize-winning field overnight.’

But it was too good to be true. Bedford and three other teams have now proved in three separate studies^2–4 that the reaction wasn’t a revolutionary discovery but simply an example of palladium’s catalytic prowess. Through a series of unfortunate events, Yu and Xu’s team had inadvertently created an exceptionally stable and active palladium complex that evaded their purification attempts and control experiments. ‘I think it seems pretty clear to me that palladium is doing this reaction and not the amine,’ comments organic chemist Shauna Paradine from the University of Rochester, US.