He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.

Pregl was born in Ljubljana within Austria-Hungary to a Slovene-speaking father and German-speaking mother.

The small quantities of substances he obtained during the research of bile acid made it necessary to improve the process of elemental analysis by reducing the necessary components.

At the end of his research, he had lowered the minimal amount of substance necessary for the analysis process by a factor of 50[citation needed].

In Slovenia, Pregl Awards have been bestowed annually since 2007 by the National Institute of Chemistry for the research work and for outstanding doctorates.