ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Elias James Corey

Elias James Corey was a very smart man who studied chemistry. He was so good at it that he won a Nobel Prize. A Nobel Prize is a really big award that people get when they do something really important and impressive.

Elias James Corey was born in 1928 in the United States, and he grew up during a time when science was very important. As a kid, he was interested in how things worked, and he liked to explore and experiment. He went to college to study chemistry, and he learned a lot about how chemicals interact with each other.

One of the things that made Elias James Corey so famous was that he developed a way of drawing and understanding chemicals, called retrosynthesis. Basically, this means that he could look at a complicated molecule made up of lots of different atoms and figure out how it was made. It's kind of like looking at a cake, and figuring out how all the ingredients were put together to make it.

This was a really important development because it helped chemists create new chemicals more easily. It also helped scientists understand how different chemicals interact with each other, which is really important for things like creating medicines that can cure diseases.

Elias James Corey's work has had a big impact on chemistry, and he is still remembered and respected today as one of the smartest and most important chemists ever.