Paul Sabatier, who shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his countryman Victor Grignard, spent thirty-two years of a fifty-year career studying heterogeneous catalysis, especially the catalytic hydrogenation of organic compounds over finely divided metals.

Born on November 5, 1854, in Carcassone, France, Sabatier attended school in Carcassone, where his uncle was a teacher. An older sister helped tutor him, taking Latin and mathematics for that purpose. When his uncle transferred to the Toulouse Lycée, Sabatier followed. While at Toulouse, he used his free time to attend a public course in physics and chemistry that gave him a taste for science.

Accepted at both the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure in 1874, he entered the latter and graduated at the head of his class in 1877. He worked as an instructor in Nîmes for a year, but teaching secondary school physics was...