Sauvage was born in Paris in 1944,[4] and earned his PhD degree from the Université Louis-Pasteur under the supervision of Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Sauvage's scientific work has focused on creating molecules that mimic the functions of machines by changing their conformation in response to an external signal.

[6] His Nobel Prize work was done in 1983, when he was the first to synthesize a catenane, a complex of two interlocking ring-shaped molecules, which were bonded mechanically rather than chemically.

Because these two rings can move relative to each other, the Nobel Prize cited this as a vital initial effort towards making molecular machine.

[11] He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines" with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L.