The biologist Eric Karsenti gold medal of the CNRS in 2015 – L’Express

Since 1954, this award annually honors all the work of a scientist who “ made an exceptional contribution to the vitality and influence of French research “. Many of its winners were then rewarded with a Nobel.

The career of Eric Karsenti, 67, emeritus director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), was marked “ by major discoveries in cell cycle regulation “, that is to say, the mechanisms by which cells from dividing, says the CNRS. The researcher conducted largely at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg (Germany).

The scientist was also a pioneer of interdisciplinary approaches in cell biology. His approach was put into practice in cell biology and biophysics department he founded in 1996 and led in the EMBL.

– A sailing enthusiast –

Enthusiast navigation, Eric Karsenti, mane and white beard, was the Scientific Director the Tara Oceans (2009-2013) which delivered its first results this year.

“ I do not expect at all to receive this gold medal. I’m happy with the recognition by my peers of my work “, told the AFP Eric Karsenti.

“ What I did before Tara Oceans as much interest me “, has insisted the researcher, already winner of the CNRS silver medal.

“ Tara Oceans is an extraordinary scientific adventure. We sought interdisciplinarity. The idea was to try to address very complex issues to successfully understand ” said the biologist.

“ I hope this medal reward understanding. We talk too often technological research. But basic research allows to know and understand. In that sense it serves more than the things that serve some “.

Born September 10, 1948 in Paris, Eric Karsenti begins at the Pasteur Institute, where he defended his thesis of State in 1979. Recruited by the CNRS in 1976, he was seconded to the University of California in San Francisco in early 1980. He then joined the Department of Cell Biology at EMBL Heidelberg.

In 1996, anxious to develop interdisciplinarity, he created the Department of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the EMBL, one of the first centers in the world involving biologists and physicists.

Eric Karsenti is currently assigned to the Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Superieure.

With his physics sea bass, Eric Karsenti came under the spotlight with the Tara Oceans he built to better understand the key role of microscopic ocean life.

For this, it is surrounded by an interdisciplinary team of international high level. From 2009 to 2013, Tara Oceans 35.’000 collected plankton samples.

The first articles, published in May in the journal Science in May 2015, are just the beginning. Analyses are “ last another four to five years ,” says Karsenti.

The last winners of the gold medal are Gérard Berry, computer scientist in 2014; Margaret Buckingham, developmental biologist in 2013; Philippe Descola anthropologist in 2012; Jules A. Hoffmann, biologist in 2011 (Medicine Nobel Prize the same year); Gérard Férey, chemist, in 2010; Haroche, physicist, in 2009 (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012).