Richard Heck | Nobel chemist, 84

Richard Heck, 84, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating a reaction that has been widely hailed for its prolific usefulness in many areas of modern life, such as drug development, electronic display screens and DNA sequencing, died Oct. 10 in the Philippines.

Dr. Heck's death in Manila was reported by the University of Delaware, where he was a professor emeritus.

Following a tradition, the reaction pioneered by Dr. Heck, a palladium-catalyzed carbon cross-coupling, carries his name.

His discovery, according to the Nobel organization, "would transform modern organic chemistry."

Dr. Heck shared the Nobel with Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Japan.

Richard Fred Heck was born in Springfield, Mass., on Aug. 15, 1931. His father was a department store salesman, and his mother was a homemaker.

When he was in his early teens, his family moved to Los Angeles. He majored in chemistry became his major at the University of California at Los Angeles, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954. After postdoctoral research, he began working at Hercules Powder (now Ashland) in Wilmington, which ultimately led to the Heck reaction.

He left Hercules (now Ashland) in 1971 to go to the University of Delaware. He retired in 1989 after a career in which he published more than 200 scientific papers.

- Washington Post