Professor David MacMillan didn’t think much of skipping a subject at university in 1989 to watch Scotland qualify for a World Cup.
And he never imagined winning a Nobel Prize for the same science topic 32 years later.
The 54-year-old was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with German scientist Benjamin List to share an £800,000 prize.
They won it for creating a new catalyst related to “enantiomers”, which are pairs of molecules that are mirror images of each other.
But that was the same subject he missed at Glasgow University to watch Mo Johnston and Ally McCoist score vital goals for Scotland in an Italia 90 World Cup qualifier.
MacMillan, who grew up in New Stevenston, Lanarkshire, said: “One of my professors, Ernie Colvin, gave me a hard time when I missed the lecture.
“He said, ‘You can’t do that, enantiomers are important.’ Turns out this Nobel Prize is actually about enantiomers, so it’s kind of ironic that all these years later I get a Nobel Prize for enantiomers, having missed the initial lecture in the first place.”
He said the biggest shock came when he received a congratulatory call from football boss Sir Alex Ferguson.
MacMillan told the university’s magazine Avenue: “He called while I was driving and I had to pull over otherwise I would have run off the road.”
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