“Funny researcher” : it was he who insisted that this term appear on the cover of the book, his first. As a counterweight, he explains, to the mention “of the Academy of Sciences” which appears under his name, and which he finds far too solemn. While being very proud to belong “at this chic club”. Where, however, he hardly goes… The immunologist Jean-Claude Weill is a goldsmith of contradiction, a king of the irreconcilable, which he drapes in a delightful irony.
Never, in the memory of a journalist, have we encountered a candidate with a portrait punctuating his sentences with metronome regularity: “I talk too much about myself, it’s not interesting. » But if we point out to him that we have come precisely to hear him talk about himself, and he immediately goes on, with talkative voluptuousness, to “stories of a funny researcher”subtitle of his unclassifiable book (Praise of the unexpected, Belin education, 2023). Thus unfurls a chronicle of biology over a century, with which he has met a number of big names all over the world, but also his own colorful existence.
He opened a non-profit dental practice on Avenue Hoche, Paris, in May 1968, but was wholeheartedly with the Maoists who would soon loot the neighborhood’s luxury grocery stores. He began frequenting the laboratories at the age of 33, but it was through a nighttime encounter at Castel, the chic nightclub in the Latin Quarter, of which he was then a regular customer. He defended his doctorate at the age of 40, but the commission which recruited him at Inserm had the feeling, according to him, that he was “a little lit”. He sends himself off like an impostor, “a zazou who would like to be a researcher”but was supported early in his career by Nobel Prize winners François Jacob (1965), David Baltimore (1975) and Niels Jerne (1984).
The contradictions of a “terrible lazy person”
In 1992 he was appointed professor at the Necker-Enfants Malades medical faculty – which doubled his salary – but he who is not a doctor does not play the role of professor either: “Just two or three hours of classes from time to time, where I talked about my research. » He sees himself as » A rebel « here “never published under the authority of a patron”but presents himself in his book as » the master « dialoguing with a disciple of James. It is defined as a “terrible lazy person”but seems to have forgotten the thousands of hours of work, at the time tedious and non-automated, that the cloning of antibody genes in chickens required in the 1980s, with the discovery of a new mechanism of diversification of the immune response.
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