Didier Raoult
Didier Raoult (* 1952 in Dakar ) is a French medical doctor , microbiologist and infectiologist .
Life
Career
Didier Raoult's father was a military doctor in Dakar, his mother a nurse. As a teenager, Didier Raoult was a defiant, poor student who repeated several grades. In 1968 he left the Lycée in the penultimate grade . He hired Renaissance on a passenger ship , then passed the Baccalauréat littéraire as a freelance candidate , tried the Chinese language for a while, went to sea again and finally took up a degree in medicine - the only study his father was willing to study. to support financially. He completed his service as an assistant doctor within eight months. He did his military service as a doctor in Tahiti . During this time he began to specialize in infectious diseases . He then worked on a postdoctoral position in the USA, but turned down an attractive job offer there. Instead, he founded a laboratory for research into rickettsiae at the Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille in 1983 .
The laboratory at the Hôpital de la Timone
Research interest in infectious diseases was not very strong at the time, and he said he was quick to make a name for himself. Since then, the laboratory has identified, described, and sequenced nearly 100 new pathogens . It now has around 140 employees and is a globally respected center for diseases such as coxiellosis and Whipple's disease . Patients from all over the world seek advice there; between 10,000 and 15,000 blood and tissue samples from around the world are submitted for analysis each year.
research results
Didier Raoult has published around 1,300 papers. He owes particular scientific fame to a series of sensational discoveries. In 2004 he published in Science the report on the DNA sequence of the mimivirus , which his laboratory had determined in collaboration with the Marseille genome laboratory of Jean-Michel Claverie . In 2008, members of his team published the report in Nature on the discovery of the Sputnik virus , a parasitic companion virus : It can only multiply in the presence of the mimivirus. The Sputnik virus is the first example of such dependent reproduction between two marine virus species. Another type of giant virus, the Marseille virus, was discovered in his laboratory in 2009.
In 2010 Didier Raoult was awarded the Grand Prize of the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) for his research . In 2011 he founded his IHU Méditerranée Infection institute in Marseille with more than 70 million euros in government funding, which specializes in infectious diseases.
Activity in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic
Didier Raoult announced in mid-March 2020 that he could cure Covid-19. He had conducted a study with 24 mildly ill patients, but without a control group and not randomized. As a result, doctors and virologists criticized the manageable number of patients and his inadequate method.
In 2020, Raoult's clinic will not only be researching a vaccine against the coronavirus, but will also prescribe the simultaneous use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin during the Covid-19 pandemic . The effectiveness of the antimalarial agent has not yet been definitively clarified, and Raoult is also silent about the side effects - including the heart can be attacked. He received encouragement for his so-called miracle drug hydroxychloroquine from US President Donald Trump , who takes the active ingredient preventively. Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro and the extreme right in France also celebrated the infectiologist from Marseille.
Didier Raoult had made two bold predictions wrong in the past. In January 2020, he predicted that no more than 10,000 people will die in France, the real death toll at the end of May 2020 was 28,000. And in April 2020 Raoult assumed that the beginning of spring would defeat the coronavirus; at the end of May 2020, 500 new infections were counted in France every day.
family
Didier Raoult is married to a psychiatrist . Both daughters have also chosen medicine as a career path.
literature
- Pierre Le Hir: Chasseur de microbes . Le Monde , November 20, 2010, p. 18 (only the beginning of the article free of charge).
- Hilmar Schmundt: Journey through the land of Liliput . Der Spiegel , October 6, 2008
Individual references and notes
- ↑ roughly equivalent to a high school diploma with a linguistic-philosophical focus
- ↑ Raoult, D; Audic, S; Robert, C; Abergel, C; Renesto, P; Ogata, H; Scola, B; Suzan, M et al. (2004): The 1.2-megabase genomic sequence of Mimivirus . Science 306: 1344-50.
- ↑ La Scola, B; Desnues, C; Pagnier, I; Robert, C; Barrassi, L; Fournous, G; Merchat, M; Suzan-Monti, M et al. (2008): The virophage is a single parasite of the giant mimivirus . Nature 455: 100-4.
- ↑ Nadia Pantel: An infectiologist who promises the French miracles. Accessed May 31, 2020 .
- ↑ Werner Bartens: Criticism of study on the treatment of Covid-19. Retrieved June 6, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Raoult, Didier |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French physician, microbiologist and infectiologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1952 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dakar |