Yasmin Belkaid, immunology researcher at the Pasteur Institute head

Yasmin Belkaid is back in France, know it! Even with drum rolls, advertising may not offend the general public. Scientists rarely make headlines – except when they win a Nobel… or propose a dubious treatment to defeat an epidemic. On the other hand, in the world of medical research, the arrival of a Franco-Algerian immunologist at the head of the Pasteur Institute, after a quarter of a century spent in the United States, is an event. Especially since only one woman has held the position before her.

“All the American universities would have given her a golden bridge and she is coming to us, it is a small miracle”Ellen Fisher, president of the Academy of Sciences, and immunologists like her breathe. “A miracle? I’d rather say it’s a very rational choiceCorrects his friend Bana Jabari, also an immunologist, a professor at the University of Chicago and the future director of the Imagine Institute in Paris. This decision combines his scientific, political and human interests. »

As for Anthony Fauci, his boss of seventeen years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he does not hide his mixed feelings. “It is with a mixture of sadness and positive excitement that we, here in the United States and at NIH, say goodbye to Yasmin Belkaid.tells us “Mr. The public health of the last eight American presidents. We are sad because we are losing one of our most beloved and valued scientists, a scientific superstar and visionary leader, but we are positively excited because we know that he will be the director of one of the most significant biomedical research institutes, Pasteur. Organizations of the world. »

The decor is set.

Science, its refuge

To speak of Yasmin Belkaid’s “return to France,” however, is to forget her third homeland. Or rather first: Algeria. It was there that she was born, in August 1968, into a binational family, deeply marked by the freedom struggle. His father left school to join the guerrillas when he was 13. A purely self-educated man, he rose through the administrative ranks to become a senior civil servant and then a minister. His mother, a French classics professor, crossed the Mediterranean in 1962 “Come and rebuild the country and repair the destruction of colonization”. In the family, therefore, we value independence, commitment and knowledge.

Young Yasmin adds a very personal passion to this cocktail: science. She discovered it while vacationing in France with her pharmacist grandmother. “She had a laboratory behind the pharmacyshe recalls. My first toys were scientific objects on a white bench. And she took me to the mountains, showed me plants, how to transform them into remedies. At the age of 6, I announced that I wanted to be a researcher. I started writing an encyclopedia. After maybe two entries, I got stuck on the letter A. But it was decided. »

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