Richard Schrock figured out how to break and remake carbon-carbon double bonds with precision using metal catalysts, a class of reactions called olefin metathesis that transformed how chemists build complex molecules. Born in Berne, Indiana on January 4, 1945, he grew up on a farm before studying chemistry at UC Riverside and earning his doctorate at Harvard under John Osborn. His breakthrough came at MIT in the 1980s, where he developed the first well-defined single-component metal catalysts for metathesis. Previous catalysts were poorly understood mixtures that worked unpredictably. Schrock built catalysts from molybdenum and tungsten that chemists could design, tune, and control at the molecular level. The reaction itself is elegant: two molecules containing carbon-carbon double bonds exchange partners, breaking apart and recombining to form new molecules. It lets chemists snap molecular chains apart and reassemble them with surgical precision. The pharmaceutical industry adopted metathesis to synthesize drugs that were previously too expensive or difficult to produce through conventional methods. The hepatitis C drug simeprevir, for example, uses a metathesis step in its manufacturing process. The plastics industry uses the reaction to create specialized polymers with tailored properties. Green chemistry initiatives embraced it because metathesis reactions often produce fewer waste products than traditional synthesis routes. Schrock shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Grubbs of Caltech and Yves Chauvin of the French Petroleum Institute. Chauvin had explained the mechanism in the 1970s; Schrock and Grubbs independently developed the catalysts that made it practical. Schrock's contribution was the fundamental chemistry: proving that a single well-defined metal center could drive the reaction, turning a laboratory curiosity into an industrial tool that now underpins billions of dollars in chemical production annually.