A chemist who helped find a way to make compounds that are used to make everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals so that they produce less hazardous waste, and who won a share of the 2005 Nobel Prize, died on Sunday. He died at the age of 78.
Barney said that his father had a heart attack while being treated at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The process that Dr. Grubbs helped perfect is called metathesis. It allows the creation of new compounds by allowing the break and formation of double bonds of carbon atoms.
In 1971 Yves Chauvin and a student of his, Jean-Louis Hérrison, explained how metathesis works, after it was first discovered and used in the 1950s.
They showed how a metal-carbon catalyst and a fragment of a molecule can be used to create a temporary bond. Two dancers are joined by two others in forming a ring after a newly created bond. The catalyst goes off when the ring breaks apart, and it rearranges its carbon bonds.
Some of the early catalysts were difficult to work with and could be unstable. In 1990 Richard H. Schrock, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made a breakthrough by developing catalysts based on the metals. The new catalysts fell apart when exposed to air, but they were more efficient than before.
In 1992 Dr. Grubbs came up with catalysts that used the metal ruthenium. His catalysts were not always as efficient as Dr. Schrock's, but they were stable in air and moreselective in how they bond with chains.
Dr. Schrock said that Dr. Grubbs took what he did and turned it into something practical.
Dr. Grubbs said that metathesis worked at all. The strongest points in the molecule are carbon-carbon double bonds. To be able to rip them apart and put them back together was a complete surprise to organic chemists.
The work of Dr. Schrock paved the way for metathesis to become a cornerstone of chemical manufacturing. Today, the catalysts they developed are used in a wide range of manufacturing processes.
The new catalysts produced less waste, particularly hazardous waste. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which manages the prizes, said that the award represents a great step forward for green chemistry.
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The 2005 winners of the Nobel Prize were honored at a reception. He was a mentor to hundreds of students and associates.
Robert Howard Grubbs was born on a farm in western Kentucky. He was the second of three children.
Robert's mother worked for more than 35 years in small rural schools and his maternal grandmother was well read and educated. She took night and weekend classes for 28 years to get her bachelor's degree, even though she received a teaching certificate when she was younger.
The farmhouse where his children were born was built by Dr. Grubbs's father. He worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, operating and maintaining heavy equipment.
The academic model of my mother and grandmother and the very practical mechanical training from my father turned out to be perfect training for organic chemical research.
He majored in agricultural chemistry at the University of Florida, combining his interest in science with his passion for farming.
While working in an animal nutrition laboratory he was invited by a friend to work in an organic chemistry laboratory run by a new university faculty member. E.S. Gould wrote a book called "Mechanisms and Structure in Organic Chemistry" which explained how chemical reactions work. He said that his lab experience and book made him devote himself to chemistry.
Dr. Grubbs was inspired by a lecture at the university by an Australian chemist who was interested in the use of metals in organic chemistry.
After earning his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Florida, he moved to Columbia University in New York for his doctorate degree. Dr. Breslow had a student in the first year of his PhD. Helen O'Kane is a speech-language pathologist from Brooklyn and she married Dr. Grubbs while he was at Columbia.
He worked for a year as a National Institutes of Health fellow after obtaining his PhD. He worked at Michigan State University until 1978. He began his research on catalysts in metathesis.
More than 100 PhD candidates and almost 200 associates have been helped by Dr. Grubbs, who worked at the California Institute of Technology until his death.
In 1998, he and Mike Giardello founded Materia, a Pasadena-based technology company that has the exclusive rights to manufacture Dr. Grubbs's catalysts. The business was sold to Umicore and then to ExxonMobil.
The Benjamin Franklin medal was given to Dr. Grubbs in 2000 and he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
He is survived by his wife and son Barney, as well as his children Brendan, Kathleen, and two sisters Marie Maines and Bonnie Berry.
As Dr. Grubbs wrote in his autobiographical sketch, his path to the Nobel had been set as a boy.
He was interested in building things as a child. I used to build things out of scrap wood instead of buying candy.
He would help his father rebuild car engines, install plumbing and build houses on the farms that his aunts and uncles lived on in Kentucky.
He discovered that building new molecule was more fun than building houses.
