Jean-Marie Lehn

Jean-Marie Lehn married Sylvie Lederer in 1965 and together they have two sons - David (born 1966) and Mathias (born 1969).

He studied music in his youth, and eventually it became his major interest after science.

He is known to be an atheist.

Jean-Marie Lehn was born on 30 September 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France, to Pierre and Marie Lehn. He was the eldest of four sons in the family.

Pierre Lehn was a baker. However, he was quite interested in music and played the piano and the organ. Eventually, he became the city organist. Marie, on the other hand, took care of the shop with assistance from her eldest son.

He spent his childhood years during World War II in Rosheim and attended a primary school after the war ended. In 1950, he joined Collège Freppel high school in Obernai, a small town a little away from Rosheim. He studied Latin, Greek, English, German, French, Philosophy and Science, especially Chemistry.

Simultaneously, he also learnt to play the piano and the organ, and eventually music became an important part of his being. In July 1957, he left high school with a Baccalauréat in Philosophy, and in September 1957, he earned a Baccalauréat in Experimental Sciences as well.

He then joined the University of Strasbourg and initially considered studying Philosophy. However, he was undecided and hence began classes with courses in physical, chemical and natural sciences.

After he received his Licencié-ès-Sciences (Bachelor degree), in October 1960, Jean-Marie Lehn joined Ourisson's laboratory as a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. There, he worked towards completing his Ph.D. research.

At Ourisson's laboratory, he was responsible for the lab’s first NMR spectrometer. He worked on conformational and physico-chemical properties of triterpenes. In 1961, he published his first scientific paper, which reported an additivity rule for substituent induced shifts of proton NMR signals in steroid derivatives.

He received his Ph.D degree in 1963 from the University of Strasbourg and soon after joined the laboratory of Robert Burns Woodward at Harvard University for a year, as a post-doctoral research fellow. Among other things, he worked on the synthesis of Vitamin B12.

At Woodward’s lab, he also followed a course in Quantum Mechanics and performed his first computations with Roald Hoffmann. In 1964, he had the opportunity to witness the initial stages of the Woodward-Hoffmann rules.

After he returned to Strasbourg in 1964, he started working in the field of physical organic chemistry, wherein he could combine the knowledge acquired in organic chemistry on physical methods and in quantum theory.

After Charles Pedersen discovered crown ethers, molecules that can attract certain metallic atoms, Jean-Marie Lehn discovered related molecules in 1969 that he called ‘Cryptands’. The cryptands could capture particular types of molecules, which made it possible to create chemical compounds through chemical reactions that had a considerable impact on biological processes. This area of research gradually developed into ‘supramolecular chemistry’, which studied intermolecular attractions instead of the bonds inside one molecule.