Henri Boris Kagan

Henri Boris Kagan’s indexed work centers on asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, with several foundational contributions emerging from his group at Université Paris-Sud. His early first-author work introduced a chiral diphosphine ligand for rhodium-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation (1972, over 1,000 citations), a system that became a benchmark in the field. A later senior-author paper established the mild preparation of samarium and ytterbium iodides as versatile reducing agents (1980, over 1,200 citations), while his 1998 review on nonlinear effects in asymmetric synthesis (over 800 citations) systematically described how enantiomeric purity can amplify during stereoselective reactions. Across his career, Kagan consistently returned to the theme of nonlinear effects, with a 2008 review and a 1986 experimental paper both demonstrating the phenomenon in asymmetric oxidations and aldolization reactions. His work also advanced asymmetric oxidation of sulfides to sulfoxides (1984, over 600 citations) and catalytic asymmetric Diels-Alder reactions (1992, over 800 citations). Taken together, these contributions trace a sustained inquiry into how chirality is transferred, amplified, and controlled in catalytic systems—from early ligand design to mechanistic explanations of enantioselective behavior.