β Scribed by John Caldwell; Nina Berova
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
He studied at the Institut de Chmie in Paris before entering military service in 1938. After the outbreak of hostilities, he was captured and was a prisioner-of-war in Germany from June 1940 until 1944. Upon his return to France, he immediately resumed his chemical career, initially under the supervision of laboratory of Professor Dele Β΄pine in the Colle `ge de France, where he spent his entire subsequent career as a Chercheur de CNRS.
His first major research was on the structure-activity relationships of steroid hormones, with important discoveries about estrogens, which contributed to the work of G Pincus, the pioneer of oral contraception. This work later led to the identification of antiandrogens, which ultimately found application in the treatment of acne and other skin disorders. The production of these steroids led Jacques to open new fields in synthesis and conformational analysis, the basis of his essential contributions to modern stereochemistry. The development by Jacques and his team of many new approaches to the resolution of optically active compounds was summarized in the classic text "Enantiomers, Racemates and Resolutions" by Jacques, Andre Β΄Collet and Samuel Wilen, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 1980. It is sad to note that his two younger co-authors both predeceased him. In addition to these studies, he also worked on liquid crystals and produced many papers on the history of chemistry and the public understanding of science.
In 1985, the year of his formal retirement, Jacques became a Chevalier of the Le Β΄gion d'Honneur and was awarded the Prix Le Β΄on Velluz of the Institut de France. With Emanuel Gil-Av, he was the first recipient on the Chirality Medal at the 2 nd International Symposium on Chiral Discrimination in Rome in 1991, indicative of the respect with which he and his work is held by the international community of stereochemists. This medal award was recognized by the dedication of a Special Issue of this journal to Jacques (Volume 13, no 1, 2001). He continued as an active and involved scientist and, as noted in the Foreword to that issue, approaching his 83 birthday, he was much in evidence at the 12 th in this series of symposia, in Chamonix-Mont Blanc in September 2000.
The symposium organized by the CNRS to mark his retirement paid tribute to a wise man (savant), a popularizer of science with a passion for chemistry and a deep desire to understand it. The international community of stereochemists is at the same time richer for his contributions and poorer for his passing.
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