Illustration of the French chemist Jean-Pierre Sauvage (born 1944). Sauvage is best known for his work on molecular machines, small organic molecules that move in response to a stimulus. In 1983 he published a paper on catenanes, a type of mechanically-interlocked molecular architecture. A catenane is composed of two interlocked macrocycles (molecular rings) that are joined by mechanical, rather than chemical, bonds. This allows movement of the bonds relative to each other. Sauvage shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work with J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa.