David Leigh

Leigh’s 8-19 molecular knot features in the 2019 Guinness Book of World Records. In 2018 he commissioned and collaborated with acapellascience on ‘Nanobot’, a parody of ‘Havana’ by Camila Cabello aimed at the general public, describing the science behind nanorobotics. The ‘Professor David Leigh Prize for Chemistry’ at Codsall Community High School encourages girls and disadvantaged children to study science at university. Leigh is a Director and Governor of Withington Girls' School.

In September 2016 Leigh was suggested as one of three candidates for the potential award of a Nobel Prize for synthetic molecular machines. However, on 5 October 2016 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to J. Fraser Stoddart, Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

In 2009 he reported the first small-molecule walker-track system in which a 'walker' can be transported directionally along a short molecular track in a manner reminiscent of the way that biological motor proteins 'walk' along biopolymers in the cell. In 2011 his research group described the smallest molecular knot prepared to date (a 76-atom-loop trefoil knot – three crossing points) and also a 160-atom-loop pentafoil knot (five crossing points). The Leigh group have also reported the synthesis of an 819 knot, the most complex molecular knot made to date. In 2013 the Leigh group reported a small-molecule machine capable of detaching and assembling a series of amino acid building blocks from a track into a peptide of specific sequence, a very primitive version of the task performed by the ribosome. They also invented the first autonomous chemically-fuelled synthetic molecular motor and demonstrated a small-molecule 'robotic arm' able to transport molecular fragments between sites 2 nm apart on a molecular platform, marking the start of so-called 'small-molecule robotics'. In 2017 the Leigh group reported the first molecular robot that can be programmed to build different molecules. The molecular robot could be programmed to construct any one of four different stereoisomers of a molecular product, a significant step towards a 'molecular assembler'. The achievement was hailed as 'science fiction becomes fact'.

David Alan Leigh (born 1963) FRS FRSE FRSC is a British chemist, Royal Society Research Professor and, since 2014, the Sir Samuel Hall Chair of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He was previously the Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (2001–2012) and Professor of Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Warwick (1998–2001).