Martin recently wrote that he thinks Judah Folkman would have been an excellent and deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize. I think he is right in the choice of someone who straddles both basic science and medicine with a fundamental concept.
In lab, over coffee, we were noticing that the French mainstream press is as slow as is the press anywhere. Our main reproach was that the first pictures of the Physiology/Medicine prize winners featured only Luc Montagnier. We think this is because
a) his pictures were in the archives, as Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is currently in Southeast Asia for reasons related to her work on HIV
b) he’s male, older, and looks like an authority figure
c) he’s French, to the disadvantage of Harald zur Hausen who did win half the prize, after all!
This is being corrected to some extent today. One quote from Barré-Sinoussi which is buried in an article I saw today was «Vous savez, c’est d’abord le travail d’une équipe, cette récompense, c’est tous les chercheurs qui la méritent, considère-t-elle. J’espère en tout cas que ce prix encouragera les jeunes chercheurs à rester en France. Ils partent tellement ils sont mal payés!» which can be translated as:
You know, this was the work of a whole team and all of its researchers deserve this reward. I hope in any case that this prize will encourage young scientists to stay in France. They are leaving because they are so badly paid!
Which is both generous and perspicacious.
I am, like many others, very happy to see a rare woman among the prize-winners. I very much like when the Nobel prize committee chooses people who are not already dramatically in the limelight – successful, influential perhaps, but not already enjoying the notoriety that they do once they earn the prize, and that across the sweep of disciplines. Barré-Sinoussi will now be a role model to countless female biologists, as was Nüsslein-Vollhard before her.
My only regret is that another deserving, older, French woman scientist is now that much more unlikely to win the Nobel in the near future, but I wouldn’t like to have them let slip the opportunity as they did for Folkman. This person is Nicole Le Douarin. The Wikipedia entry doesn’t do her contribution justice.
A developmental biologist, Le Douarin is known for her meticulous studies of animal chimeras which have led to critical insights regarding the nervous and immune systems of higher vertebrates. She invented a cell-tracing technology in the early 1970’s to produce chimeric embryos from chicken and quails. She showed that precursor cells within the neural crest are multipotent stem cells, well before “stem cells” were a hot research topic. Her technique has also permitted her to develop significant research on the circulatory and immune systems.
To me, one of her most exceptional contributions is to have trained and inspired an entire school of embryology, populated with many dozens if not hundreds of previous students (she has supervised at least 50 Ph.D. theses) who themselves have brought enormous contributions to understanding both how cell lineages are related and how the body is put together but also what can go wrong during its construction. A large if not comprehensive list of her invited lectures is here.
Like Luc Montagnier, Nicole Le Douarin pushed to have a three-year extension of the mandatory retirement age of 65 years old in order to continue her passionate and valuable contributions to science. Montagnier currently directs the Unesco World Foundation for Aids Research and Prevention, but in the late 1990’s came up against this barrier, and not coincidentally took a chair at Queen’s College in New York (some reasons explained at the beginning of this interview).
Nicole Le Douarin’s similar response at the time was to attempt to found a new developmental biology institute in the center of Paris, with Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas as director, as he was another expatriate researcher who wanted to work in Europe again. Only now is this initiative bearing fruit, but meanwhile, Nicole has continued to participate in laboratory research at the Institut Alfred Fessard in Gif-sur-Yvette. But it is nothing like the heyday of her lab in Nogent, which she was forced to close for this arbitrary administrative rule.
In a little less than an hour, the focus will be on Physics. Looking forward to seeing what others will write about their own heros and heroines!
I hope in any case that this prize will encourage young scientists to stay in France.
I wonder what these Nobel prizes will do for France and Germany as places to do research. And I’m very happy with the prize for Harald zur Hausen, the first German Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine since Nüsslein-Vollhard in 1995. His work has some of the features I like about Judah Folkman’s work (e.g. sticking to a concept that nobody believed in, translational research).
As mentioned by a few people around the laboratory – in the 1980’s, France was a desirable place to perform cutting-edge research. People came out of their Ph.D.s to a pretty much guaranteed job. Of these, this prize is proof that not all were slackers just because it was easier to get employed, which is a commonly held assertion.
We have the same conversation in the UK, Heather.
Historically many of the UK (biology) Nobelists came from “institutes” like the LMB in Cambridge, i.e. places where people were largely left alone to get on with it. For instance, I seem to remember from the book John Sulston did with Georgina Ferry that Suluston didn’t have to write any kind of funding proposal until he was approaching his 40s and had been at the LMB for a decade, though I could have misremembered the details.
Anyway, the same allegations of “security breeds slackers” tend to be heard whenever anyone mentions the loss of “Job-for-life without annual tooth-and-nail re-competition” posts in research. I reckon this is universal.
I remember some of those slackers! One of them was
notorious – he had tenure in a prestigious institute, yet ran a business on the side. He only came in to the lab one day a week, and that was for a purpose connected to his business. This went on for years. Someone else I knew was an art dealer though he was drawing a salary as a full-time scientist. You didn’t see him around very much on auction days.
Okay, so they exist – but places like Janelia Farm were designed to offer LMB or Bell Labs-like conditions of not having to scrabble for short periods of funding, and enable people to get on with it.
… such as, looking for employment or looking for lab funding. It does sound rather paradisiac.