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 Avksentiev, daughter of Nikolai Avksentiev. 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.
During World War II, Pregel was the agent for the Canadian Eldorado Mining & Refining Co. which supplied the Manhattan Project with nearly all the uranium mined in the North America. He also sold 500 pounds of uranium oxide to the Soviet Union during the war although the U.S. Government had authorized the sale.[1]
In March 1945 the Canadian Foreign Exchange Control Board began formal hearings into Pregel's financial dealings. The case was settled out of court but Pregel and the other defendants paid over $1million in cash and other assets to settle. Furthermore Pregel agreed to terminate his agency agreement between Eldorado and the Canadian Radium & Radium Corp.[2]
Pregel founded the Boris Pregel Awards for science, awarded by the New York Academy of Sciences.