Paris

France's science minister has written to the director of the Nobel Foundation, Michael Sohlman, protesting that French chemist Henri Kagan of Paris-Sud University was not given a share of this year's chemistry prize.

The unusual move by the minister, Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg, comes after several French scientists voiced their dismay that Kagan missed out.

The coveted prize — which can be shared by no more than three scientists — went to K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, Ryoji Noyori of Nagoya University, Japan, and William Knowles, formerly of Monsanto in St Louis, Missouri, for work on catalytic asymmetric synthesis (see Nature 413, 661; 2001).

The French minister's 5 November letter uses arguments taken from an article by Didier Astruc, an organic chemist at the University of Bordeaux, in Le Monde newspaper. The letter argues that Henri Kagan was the true pioneer in the field of catalytic asymmetric synthesis, citing his 1971 demonstration of the catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation of olefins in which he produced a large excess of one chiral product.

However, the citation issued by the Nobel Foundation in support of the prize names William Knowles as the founding father of catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation, having first demonstrated the process in 1968. But it states that the chiral product he produced at that time “was modest and hardly of any practical use”.

In an interview in the newspaper Libération, Léon Ghosez, a chemist from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, denounced the French minister's initiative as “grotesque”, adding that the letter would “neither serve the interests of Kagan nor of French chemistry”.

Kagan told Nature that he is not behind the science minister's initiative and prefers not to comment on the matter.