A Scottish professor mocked the England football team while accepting his Nobel prize for chemistry by revealing a spectacular goal against them helped inspire his scientific breakthrough.
David MacMillan told how watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the Sweden striker, score an overhead kick from almost 40 yards in a 4-2 win against England in 2012 helped inspire his breakthrough discovery.
MacMillan, a Scotland and Rangers fan, included a video of the goal in his Nobel lecture as he officially accepted the honour at a ceremony last week.
The 53-year-old told delegates from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which organises the awards, that Ibrahimovic had used “precision technique” to score the goal, although he added it was against a team that wasn’t “particularly good”.
MacMillan said he and his team at Princeton University had set out to use the same “precision” in their work on creating an organic catalyst to speed up chemical reactions.
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“One way to describe this is to talk about the footballing god Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who is someone who is a precision footballer who does precise things and achieves really fantastic outcomes,” MacMillan said.
“One example of this is this goal he scores where you can see here he does an overhead kick from almost 40 yards out to score this goal. Now he wasn’t playing against a team that was particularly good, but the point is he performs a precision technique to score a beautiful outcome — a beautiful goal. And we were interested, could we do the same with our catalyst?”
Ibrahimovic, 40, who has played for Barcelona and Manchester United, scored all four of his country’s goals in the friendly victory and has regularly taunted England fans about it. Last year the player posted a photo of him recreating the goal on holiday in St Tropez alongside the message: “God Save The Queen”.
It was announced in October that MacMillan, from New Stevenston, Lanarkshire, was to jointly receive the Nobel prize for chemistry with the German scientist Benjamin List last week. The two men will share a prize worth more than £800,000.
MacMillan gained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Glasgow University in 1991, before being awarded a PhD in organic chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1996. He studied at Harvard University before beginning his career at the University of California, Berkeley, moving to Caltech and then Princeton University in 2006.
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A big football fan, he said that being invited to appear on the Radio Scotland show Off The Ball was the best part about winning the Nobel Prize.
