Jean-Marie Lehn
French chemist · France · Scientists · Born 1939 · age 87
Jean-Marie Lehn is read about 64 times a day, in 58 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 17 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He showed how molecules recognize each other - how a drug knows which cell to kill and which to spare - and won the Nobel for cracking the chemistry of molecular assemblies that self-organize through attraction alone.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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Awards
About this person
Jean-Marie Lehn was born 30 September 1939 in France and became an early architect of supramolecular chemistry, the study of host-guest molecular systems held together not by bonds but by intermolecular forces. In 1987 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen for synthesizing cryptands, cage-like structures that trap ions with exquisite selectivity. The work opened a new grammar for chemists: instead of building molecules atom by atom, you could design components that find and bind each other on their own. By January 2006 his group had published 790 peer-reviewed articles, and he has kept working in the field he helped invent, refining the language of molecular recognition.
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