Boris Pregel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Boris Pregel (1893 - 1976) was a dealer in uranium and radium. He was born in the Ukraine but moved to Paris after the October Revolution. In 1937 he married Alexandra Avksentev, daughter of Nikolai Avksentev. The couple moved to New York in 1940, due to the Nazi invasion of France.

From the 1920s to the Second World War Pregel and Edgar Sengier, a Belgian mining engineer, controlled the world's supply of radium which mainly came from the Belgian Congo and Canada. Sengier was effectively in charge of the mining company, Union Minière, in the Congo. Boris Pregel was president of the Canadian Radium & Uranium Corp. of New York

Pregel founded the Boris Pregel Awards for science, awarded by the New York Academy of Sciences.