Foreword
Texte intégral
1Dear Edith Heard,
2I don’t have much to add to the recorded message of Serge Haroche who asked me to stand in for him as he has to be in Stockholm today… I will simply note that after obtaining your PhD in oncology in London, you crossed the Channel in 1990 to take up a position at the Institut Pasteur, under Philip Avner. Ten years later, after a short sabbatical in Cold Spring Harbor, you joined the Institut Curie on an ATIP/Avenir contract. You are still in the Institut Curie, where you have been leading the Biology of Development unit for several years.
3Your intellectual career has been marked by a large number of significant discoveries resulting from your interest in the inactivation of an X chromosome, in those individuals who have the privilege of having two, of course. The genes are present on both X chromosomes, but are inactivated on one of them by mechanisms that you have contributed to bringing to light. This line of research has led you to immerse yourself in the world of epigenetics and genetic imprints, the physiology of which we are now understanding more and more.
4If I may allow myself a personal choice, I would say that one of the most striking aspects of your numerous impressive studies on this inactivation of the X is its dynamic and even momentarily reversible nature, along with the diversity of the mechanisms brought into play through the species that you have studied.
5Apart from this unexpected example of evolutionary convergence, your ideas can also be related to current interest in the role of non-coding RNA in the regulation of gene expression, especially sets of genes, through their impact on the three-dimensional structure of chromosomes, one of your recent research subjects. Finally, I have to mention the role of these non-coding RNA in the instability of genomes, which we know play a key part in the evolution of species and their physiology, and therefore also in many pathologies.
6These few words are certainly not sufficient to cover your contribution to our understanding of these epigenetic mechanisms, but I am sure that your inaugural lecture and all your further lectures will amply inform us on this domain. It is a field that sheds new light on all the life sciences and, as Serge Haroche has pointed out, prompts us to reopen epistemological debates that we had thought were definitively settled.
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