Palladium is practically indispensable for making drugs, but it's also more expensive than gold, and molecules that contain it can be extremely toxic
It’s hard to find a place on Earth untouched by palladium. The silvery-white metal is a key part of catalytic converters in the world’s 1.4 billion cars, which spew specks of palladium into the atmosphere. Mining and other sources add to this pollution. As a result, traces of palladium show up in some of the most remote spots on Earth, from Antarctica to the top of the Greenland ice sheet.
Thomas Fuchß, a medicinal chemist at the life-sciences company Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, gives the example of a reaction to make 3 kilograms of a drug molecule for which the ingredients cost US$250,000. The palladium catalyst alone adds $100,000; purifying it out of the product another $30,000. Several times in the past two decades, researchers have reported finding palladium-free catalysts. But in what has become a recurring pattern for the field, each heralded discovery turned out to be a mistake.
Chemists were instantly excited — and sceptical. Researchers around the world attempted to verify the extraordinary claims in their own laboratories. Within two months, three teams published preprints arguing that palladium contamination was catalysing the coupling reaction.
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