Of particular interest to Bergman, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, is the step-by-step process by which chemical reactions occur.
Hidden in between the starting materials and the products they become are molecules called intermediates.
The lifetimes of intermediates are only tiny fractions of seconds long, but they hold the key to understanding what and how chemical reactions -- anything from refining oil into gasoline to a virus invading a cell -- take place.
Bergman's first significant discovery came in the early 1970s, when he and his research team "identified a very unusual intermediate called a 1,4-benzene diradical," he said. "There weren't any applications for it - it was just interesting methodology."
A few years later, however, a pharmaceutical company found two antibiotics that could cleave DNA, and thus might be able to attack cancer cells at their underpinnings: their genetic blueprints.
"They were very complicated molecules, but buried in the middle was the same diradical chemistry. It set off a wave of research and the publication of hundreds of papers," said Bergman. Chemists now commonly refer to this diradical transformation as the Bergman reaction.
The experience shows the importance of fundamental research, he added: "Often at the time of discovery you don't know what something may be good for, but it can turn out to have very practical consequences later on."
The chemist is also known for discovering the first reaction that inserts metal atoms into alkanes, the saturated chains of hydrocarbons like those in crude oil. That insertion is a first step in turning typically inert alkanes into compounds that will react to ultimately form plastics, industrial chemicals and other products.
Bergman received his undergraduate degree in 1963 from Carleton College, where he edited the school newspaper and "almost became a journalist," he said. Instead he chose graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1966. He is a member of the ACS divisions of organic and inorganic chemistry.