On 2 June 2026, the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation awarded its Grand Prix for science, and its 275,000 euros, to a chemist who had planned nothing of the sort: to unsettle a legacy a century and a half old. Véronique Gouverneur teaches chemistry at Oxford. What she found to produce fluorine could render obsolete part of the processes on which an entire global industry rests. Behind this distinction lies a trajectory made not of a flash of genius, but of three successive breakthroughs, each ten years apart. To understand them, we have to trace the thread back.
A Flemish childhood and a taste for what others neglect
Born in 1964 into a Flemish family, Véronique Gouverneur grew up alongside a father with an unusual path: trained as an engineer, a doctor in chemistry, then a diplomat at UNESCO, and an author of books. A home where equations lived beside sentences. For a child, that proximity leaves its mark. She would later say that her attraction to chemistry owed a great deal to this man who moved from the sciences to words without seeming to see a border between them.
At school, the sciences and the arts competed for her favour. Chemistry won, not by calculation but by curiosity, because it opened onto an infinity of directions. This trait, a taste for the ground no one occupies, would become the signature of her whole career. It seems anecdotal at first and yet it explains the essential of what follows.
Fluorine: a precious atom that nature avoids and industry fears
To grasp the scope of her work, we first have to look at the atom to which she devoted everything.
The starting problem. Fluorine is the most electron-hungry element in the entire periodic table. Grafted onto a molecule, it radically changes its behaviour: a drug degrades more slowly in the body, a material resists better, a battery electrolyte gains performance. As a result, this atom is found in roughly one drug in five, in fertilisers, polymers, refrigerant fluids. But that same strength has a formidable downside. The bonds between carbon and fluorine are so hard to break that they give rise to PFAS, those compounds that persist indefinitely in the environment and are nicknamed the forever pollutants.
What drew Véronique Gouverneur in. A paradox intrigued her more than anything: living organisms make almost no fluorinated molecules, whereas human industry has built a flourishing chemistry around them. That gap between natural rarity and artificial ubiquity seemed to her a territory worth exploring. To this was added a very practical reason when she arrived at Oxford: since none of her colleagues took an interest in fluorine, the field was open.
First breakthrough: seeing inside the body with fluorine 18
The years before Oxford lay the groundwork: a thesis at the Catholic University of Louvain, a postdoctoral stay in the United States in 1992, then four years as a lecturer in Strasbourg, on a subject other than fluorine. A former lab colleague, who became a manager at the French Atomic Energy Commission, pinpoints the moment of take-off precisely: it was by turning to fluorine chemistry that she truly found her path. She settled in Oxford in 1998, became a professor in 2008, then holder of the Waynflete Chair in 2022.
The problem. Positron emission tomography, the PET scan, makes it possible to visualise the activity of a living organ and to spot a tumour or the first signs of Alzheimer's disease. It requires injecting the patient with a tracer, a molecule marked by a radioactive atom that becomes visible on screen. One of the best candidates for that role is fluorine 18.
The state of the art at the time. The difficulty lies in an almost cruel time constraint: fluorine 18 decays in less than two hours. Between the moment the isotope is produced and the moment it must be fixed onto the right molecule and injected into the patient, the margin is minuscule. The available methods were slow, capricious, and closed the door to many molecules of interest.
Why the solution is remarkable. The approaches developed at Oxford made this labelling fast, reliable and applicable to molecules previously out of reach. They thereby broadened the repertoire of tracers available for diagnosis and for developing new drugs. This contribution earned her the Royal Society's Davy Medal in 2024, one of the discipline's highest honours. A medal that a certain Henri Moissan had received in 1896, and whose name is about to return.
Second breakthrough: producing fluorine without the poison that has haunted industry since 1886
It was in 2020 that her trajectory tipped towards what is probably her most spectacular discovery. Rather than continuing to handle fluorine, she decided to go back to its source.
The problem. All the fluorine we use comes from a single ore, fluorspar, that is to say calcium fluoride. And the atom still has to be extracted from it in a usable form.
The state of the art, unchanged for a hundred and forty years. In 1886, Henri Moissan managed to isolate fluorine by electrolysis, a feat that would earn him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1906. His method requires going through hydrofluoric acid. Yet this acid ranks among the most dangerous substances in all of industry: it can kill, pass through skin, eat away at bone, explode, pollute. And since that date, despite its acknowledged danger, no substitute route had emerged. The entire industry treated this obligatory step as a technical fatality.
The solution, and why it changes everything. The idea from Oxford abandons heat and acid in favour of an unexpected physical principle: mechanical friction. By spinning the ore and a potassium phosphate salt in a ball mill for several hours, the team obtains a stable powder, named Fluoromix, capable of transferring fluorine onto all sorts of molecules destined for pharmaceuticals, agrochemistry or electrochemistry. This process belongs to a still young field, mechanochemistry, where a reaction is activated neither by fire nor by light but by the impact of grains. The feat is twofold. On one hand, removing hydrofluoric acid from the equation, which no one had managed since Moissan. On the other, achieving it through a gesture of almost disconcerting simplicity: you grind, and the fluorine is released. Working out what was happening at the atomic scale still took nearly a year. That is the mark of great simple ideas, obvious once stated, long to see through. This work was published in the journal Science in 2023.
This second breakthrough says a great deal about Véronique Gouverneur's way of leading. She holds that, surrounded by talented young researchers, her responsibility is to entrust them with challenges dizzying enough to force them to surpass themselves. Hence a reputation for demandingness, at the head of a group of more than twenty-five people. A demandingness that resembles, at bottom, an extraction of human potential. Without acid.
Third breakthrough: destroying the forever pollutants and recovering their fluorine
The next discovery illustrates a truth researchers know well: the unforeseen, when you pay attention to it, is sometimes worth more than the best-laid plan.
The revealing accident. During the mechanochemistry trials, the researchers recovered more fluorine than theory predicted. Looking for the cause, they found an improbable culprit: the sealing joints of the small jar in which the grinding took place. When they were made of Teflon, the surplus appeared. In rubber, nothing. Yet Teflon belongs to the PFAS family. The process was therefore disintegrating, unasked, one of those pollutants said to be indestructible.
The problem, and the state of the art. PFAS owe their near-immortality to the robustness of the carbon-fluorine bond. Breaking that bond was not unheard of, but the known methods often demanded aggressive conditions, polluting reagents, and merely destroyed without recovering anything. Waste was disposed of by creating more.
Why the solution is remarkable. The process born of this accident, published in the journal Nature in March 2025, mobilises no polluting reagent and, above all, returns the fluorine in a reusable form, along with other valuable by-products. Waste becomes resource again. We thus shift from a logic of perpetual extraction, which draws ever more from the subsoil, towards a logic of circularity, where the fluorine already in circulation is recycled. The stakes are far from theoretical: the European Union now classifies this ore among its critical raw materials. A sign of the interest aroused, a Paris symposium held in April on chemistry and PFAS, at which she gave the closing lecture, was fully booked.
A debate, because every real breakthrough provokes one
It would be dishonest to present this third advance as a consensus. A specialist in environmental chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich objects that recovering fluorine could, paradoxically, feed the problem, since this fluorine partly serves to make new PFAS.
Véronique Gouverneur's answer does not deny the difficulty, it shifts it. Her position is to call for a ban on toxic and non-essential PFAS, those that serve neither health nor the energy transition, while maintaining close ties with industry. In her view, that is the only way to stay confronted with the real, far from disembodied principles. The stance of a practitioner rather than a doctrinaire, which no doubt explains part of her effectiveness.
From the bench to the market: innovation all the way through
A laboratory discovery is worth, in the last resort, only as much as its capacity to exist outside the laboratory, at an industrial scale and under viable economic conditions.
Rather than stopping at publication, Véronique Gouverneur co-founded a company in 2022, FluoRok, with one of her former postdocs, a co-author of the Science paper. The firm chose to concentrate its efforts first on a single but strategic target: the manufacture of LiPF6, the fluorinated compound at the heart of lithium battery electrolytes. She describes this route as without equivalent in the world and lets its potential impact be measured. At sixty-one, with more than fifteen patents, she approaches this entrepreneurial adventure with the assurance of a leader who knows the rules of the market.
What this trajectory teaches companies
These three breakthroughs, taken together, sketch a model of innovation that runs counter to the usual clichés.
Nothing here resembles the isolated stroke of genius. Everything proceeds from a stubborn patience and a rare discipline: that of leaving a subject as soon as it becomes comfortable, to open another. Fluorine 18 labelling, production without hydrofluoric acid, recycling fluorine from PFAS. Three times, ten years apart, the same method: take a problem everyone believed closed, examine its forgotten premises, and accept the risk of a path no one was taking. The accident of the Teflon joint reveals its price: a team trained in rigour knows how to see, in a detail that might have passed for a simple leak, the seed of a discovery.
For a company, the lesson is tangible. A fluorine chemistry rid of hydrofluoric acid means reduced risk for operators, lower energy consumption, a lighter carbon footprint and less dependence on an exposed supply chain. Combined with recycling fluorine from the forever pollutants and producing battery electrolytes, it lets us glimpse an entire sector liable to transform within a decade. The players who grasp the nature of these breakthroughs early will occupy markets that others will discover ten years late, once the evidence has become obvious to all.
What comes next is already sketched. Véronique Gouverneur's next aim is to eliminate difluorine, another toxic gas of industrial processes. She admits her time is limited, and frames the question knowing that others may solve it. Her simplest wish has nothing industrial about it: that young people turn to the sciences and taste, as she did, the vertigo of a discovery. Something, she says in substance, that our era particularly needs.
All of this because a child of Flanders, daughter of a man who loved chemistry as much as books, kept looking in this atom for a thousand doors to open and never accepted that a question be closed on the grounds that it had been for a long time.
To go further
- The work of Véronique Gouverneur's team is published open access in Science (2023) and Nature (2025).
- FluoRok, the company born of this research, is industrialising the process without hydrofluoric acid, starting with battery electrolytes.