How can you not be moved, when you return more than sixty years later to the Kléber high school in Strasbourg, to unveil a plaque with your name in the large videoconference room. Now 80 years old, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, was 18 years old in 1962 when he was admitted to a science prep class at Kléber. “I was happy to stabilize. I chose Strasbourg as my birthplace,” says the former CNRS research professor, who had a very difficult time with his 15 moves until the age of 18. He ended up settling in Drachenbronn and at the Haguenau high school.
“Even if I was better at maths, I wanted to enter the National School of Chemistry in Strasbourg after being pushed by a teacher” Kléber's prep will open the doors of this great school for him. Jean-Pierre Sauvage will then join the team of Jean-Marie Lehn, another of the 18 Nobel Prize winners in Strasbourg since 1901.
“I wasn’t at the top of the class at all before I found stability”
“A Nobel Prize is the result of the work of a team… I was not at the top of the class at all before I found stability. Everything is possible,” he tells the Kléber students, with a “humility that commands admiration,” remarks principal Helena Costa. Jean-Pierre Sauvage gave a first conference on Tuesday, November 12, in front of middle and high school students from Kléber, before returning on Wednesday to meet the prep students. And pay tribute to the science which made it possible in one year to find a solution to covid. “We need a stimulus for humanity to wake up”, notes the Nobel who now “hopes” that the problem of global warming will be resolved by “science and responsible behavior”.
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