University of Lyon

François Auguste Victor Grignard was a Nobel Prize-winning French chemist. Grignard was the son of a sail maker. After studying mathematics at... Lyon he transferred to chemistry and discovered the synthetic reaction bearing his name in 1900. He became a professor at the University of Nancy in 1910 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912. During World War I he studied chemical warfare agents, particularly the manufacture of phosgene and the detection of mustard gas. His counterpart on the German side was another Nobel Prize winning Chemist, Fritz Haber. Grignard is most noted for devising a new method for generating carbon-carbon bonds using magnesium to couple ketones and alkyl halides. This reaction is valuable in organic synthesis. It occurs in two steps: The Grignard reaction is an important means of preparing organic compounds from smaller precursor molecules. For this work, Grignard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912 jointly with fellow Frenchman Paul Sabatier.
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Philippe Claudel , is a French writer and film director. Claudel was born in Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, Meurthe-et-Moselle. In addition to his writing,... Claudel is a Professor of Literature at the University of Nancy. He directed the 2008 film I've Loved You So Long . Much admired, it won the 2009 BAFTA for the best film not in English. After studying in Nancy, he remained there, and for eleven years worked as teacher in prisons. Contact with his students inspired short stories, novels and then screenplays. He has said that the experience made him give up his simple opinions about people, about guilt, about the necessity to judge others. "It's clear to me now that it would have been impossible for me to write a novel like Brodeck's Report or Grey Souls, to make a movie like I've Loved You So Long, if I hadn't been in jail." His best-known work to date is the novel Les Âmes grises , which won the Prix Renaudot in France, was shortlisted for the American Gumshoe Award, and won Sweden's Martin Beck Award.
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