Richard Fred Heck is an American chemist well known for the discovery and development of the “Heck reaction”. He was awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010 with Japanese chemists Ei-ichiNegishi and Akira Suzuki, for their work on the palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions in organic synthesis. The reaction uses palladium as a catalyst in reactions coupling aryl halides with alkenes.
Richard F. Heck discovered a new carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction mediated by palladium, which forms substituted olefins. The reaction is now named as “Heck Reaction” or “Heck-Mizoroki reaction” (Tsutomu Mizoroki detailed a similar reaction independently). This method is a valuable framework for organic synthesis.
Heck’s reaction was also used to couple fluorescent dyes to DNA bases, which helped in DNA sequencing and sequencing of the human genome.
CHEMIST (palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions, heck reactions) 
2005 – The Wallace H. Carothers Award
2006 – Herbert C. Brown Award
2010 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry
J. T. Link: The Intramolecular Heck Reaction. In: Organic Reactions. Band 60, Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey 2002, S. 157–534.
R. F. Heck: Palladium Reagents in Organic Synthesis, Academic Press, New York 1985. XX, 461 S., ISBN 0-12-336140-0.
