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The Letter

N ° 5 A c a d e m i c y e a r 2 0 0 9 – 2 0 1 0

5 of the Collège de France

Teaching research in the making

The Collège de France was created in 1530 by François I

The Collège’s motto is “Docet omnia”: the vocation to teacheverything

The lectures are open to anyone, there are no registration fees, no diplomas are awarded The program is changed each year

Dissemination of knowledge- Lectures, seminars, guest lecturers from abroad, internationaland multidisciplinary conferences: attended by 120,000 peopleannually- Publications: abstracts of work under way (Yearbook), Inaugural lectures, reopening symposiums and guest professors'lectures, DVDs Website in French and English (www.college-de-france.fr)(4,500 visits/day), Podcasts (3,350,000 downloads/month),audio and video retransmissions - Lectures broadcast by France-Culture(800,000 listeners/month)

57 chairs - 52 Chairs + 5 Chairs renewed annually (Artistic Creation,Information Technology and Digital Sciences, Knowledge againstPoverty, Sustainable Development–Environment, Energy andSociety, Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt) - Promoting the emergence of new disciplines- Multidisciplinary approach to cutting-edge research - Creation of a new Chair in the scientific domain of everynominated professor (Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry,Biology and Medicine, Philosophy, Sociology, Economics,Archaeology, History, Study of the great civilizations, Linguisticsand Literature)

International relations - Lectures ans conferences delivered abroad- The professors may deliver some of their lectures abroad(Agreements with: Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China,USA, Israel, Lebanon, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, CzechRepublic)- Foreign professors invited- Program of reception of post-doctoral researchers from abroad

Research at the Collège de France and training throughresearch- 4 institutes (Institute of Biology, Institute of the ContemporaryWorld, Institute of Oriental Studies, Institute of Literary Studies)- Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology–C.I.R.B.- more than 300 researchers- 148 PhD students and post-doctoral students- 315 engineers, technicians and administrative staff- 7 research teams hosted- Affiliated organizations: Collège de France, CNRS, INSERM,Universities, EPHE, EHESS, Pasteur Institute

The Collège de France libraries A heritage of rare books and some of the best specializedlibraries in Europe Open to a public of outside specialists

- General library: 120,000 books- Social anthropology library: 28,000 books - Libraries of the Oriental Studies Institute: Egyptology, AncientNear East, Byzantium, Arab, Turkish and Islamic Studies, Far East(India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan): 500,000 books

Budget- Operating budget: 14.8 M€

State grant: 6.7 M€Own income: 1.7 M€Institutional contracts : 6.4 M€

- Total payroll: 15.1 M€

Sponsorship- Collège de France Foundation- Collège de France Hugot Foundation

Relations with the business world- Contracts with industry- Budé Committee, corporate managers club

“What the Collège de France is expected to bring to itsaudiences is not established knowledge, but the idea of freeresearch.”(Ce que le Collège de France, depuis sa fondation, est chargé de donner à sesauditeurs, ce ne sont pas des vérités acquises, c’est l’idée d’une recherche libre.)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Editorial

by Pierre CorvolAdministrator

of the Collège de FranceProfessor,

chair of Experimental Medicine

Whether our elders like it or not, the Collège deFrance’s motto, Docet Omnia, is incomplete. DocetOmnes Omnia would be more accurate: it teacheseverything to everyone. No registration, noconstraint: whoever wishes to attend a lecture,symposium or seminar at the Collège de France cando so unconditionally, freely and at no charge. Thiscustom is so rare that both in France and abroad ittends to surprise even our fellow academics. TheCollège is neither limited to an academic syllabus, nordelivers qualifications, nor requires its audiences toundergo any test of the knowledge acquired throughits teaching. This has been so since 1530, at least inprinciple, since we are not entirely sure of where andunder what conditions the first royal lectors taught. Itseems that the earliest audiences were students,scholars from the Latin Quarter and the MontagneSainte Geneviève, a campus before the term existed.At the Collège they sought knowledge not dispensedby the universities.

Often, when I am presenting the Collège de France andits teaching missions, people ask me what types ofaudiences attend the lectures. Who comes to the Collège’slectures, what is their level of education, their regularity,their assiduity? What is their motivation? What do theyderive from the lectures? Until now there were as manyanswers to these questions as chairs at the Collège, foreach of the professors had some idea of his or heraudiences. However, no overall answer could be givenbecause no study had been carried out on the subject.Some of the more highly specialized lectures werefaithfully attended by small numbers of the initiated. Incontrast, well-to-do crowds thronged to Bergson’slectures, for example, and photos of the time showpeople clinging to the windows, avidly listening to themaster’s words. Today, video recordings of the most well-attended lectures are broadcast live in several lecturehalls.

We can assume that the question of their audienceswas of little concern to the Collège professors in the

past and is hardly more of one today. Rightly so, andthere is nothing about that that should offend thoseaudiences. As the Collège de France emphasizes, itslectures are above all the fruit of personal work: thedemanding, concentrated and intellectual result ofeach Professor’s own research. That is what sets itapart: it is anything but a media exercise. Theaudiences present in its lecture halls witness theelaboration of an intellectual product, thedevelopment of arguments structuring a theory, thedisclosure of new discoveries and their interpretation.Very often the lectures lead to the publication ofscientific articles or books. The audiences are thusboth necessary and contingent: on the one hand theyare the indispensable and privileged witnesses of athought process taking shape and being expressed invivo before them; on the other, the nature andcomposition of the audience is of no relevance to thelecture itself.

One has to bear in mind, however, that thisknowledge is ultimately intended for the public, andthat the public shows a strong demand for knowledgein all scientific disciplines. To teach everyone, theCollège and its lecture halls would be hopelesslyinsufficient, but the Internet has broadened them tothe scale of our planet. And the audiences havefollowed suit. Statistics on visits to the Collège’swebsite and its multimedia platforms (Daily Motion,iTunes U) have revealed the existence of virtualaudiences outnumbering the ones on campus.

To find out who these audiences are and what theyhope to get out of the Collège’s lectures, we ran asurvey on the attendees of Collège de France lecturesin early 2010. In parallel, a survey was also run onthe Collège’s online audiences, in 2009 and in 2010.The results are presented in detail by Henri Leridon inthe present issue (p. 57). To sum up those of thesurvey carried out at the Collège, a profile of theaverage attendee can be drawn: man or woman, agedover 55, living in or around Paris (Ile de France), with

A new audience for the Collège de France

a high cultural level, usually unemployed or retired, andwho say they attend the lectures for their personalinterest. Over half of them say they attend at least twolecture series. The picture is however not quite as clear-cut when it comes to the hard sciences: mathematics,physics and the natural sciences. This public is youngerand includes far more students and researchers.

The profile of the average respondent to the Webquestionnaire differs considerably from the one above.Most are men, they live in Ile de France (51%),elsewhere in France (35%) or abroad (14%), and themajority are in the 25–34 age-group and are students,teachers or researchers. They follow the lectures fortheir own interest (63%), for their studies or forprofessional reasons (37%). Fewer of them have or hadpositions at a senior managerial level (46%) than in theaudiences who attend lectures at the Collège (70%).

These surveys, which were short and therefore partialand imperfect, nevertheless had the merit of producingan outline of the Collège de France’s virtual audiencesfor the first time, and of enabling us to compare themto its traditional audiences who attend lectures oncampus. This calls for several comments:

1. First, by making its lectures available on its website,the Collège de France has met an expectation. In lessthan three years, large new audiences have discoveredthe institution, subscribed to its podcasts, and started touse the published versions of its lectures (in text, audioand video format) for their personal interest or forlearning, teaching and research purposes. The Collège’steaching is no longer reserved only for a few fortunateinhabitants of Paris and surrounding areas, as we wrotein the editorial of the Lettre du Collège de France inJune 2006; it is now accessible to all.

2. The Collège’s new online audiences are younger andare mostly students or employed. In addition there arethe PhD students who are hosted by the Collège fortheir research, essentially in the mathematical, physicaland natural sciences (320 students in 2010). Theseyoung people will in turn impart the knowledge thatthey acquired at the Collège.

3. The answers to the survey questionnaires as well asfree comments show that Internet users are loyal andare satisfied with the Collège’s lectures on the Web, asare the audiences that attend lectures on campus.

4. The diversity of the Collège’s offer in terms ofcontent and educational media is a valuable asset thatshould be preserved. The survey shows that all types ofmedia interest Internet users and that we should notfavour any particular one. In this spirit, the Collège is

currently putting online the texts of certain lectures, aswell as other types of content: inaugural lectures, theCollège de France yearly report, the Letter of theCollège de France, and other text documents (notablyon the site revues.org).

5. The survey revealed that 14% of the Internet usersdo not live in France. This is a strong encouragement tomake the Collège known beyond our borders, both inFrench-speaking countries and beyond. The next stepwould therefore be to have certain lectures andseminars translated into English so that they can bedisseminated throughout the world. In this way theCollège will actively contribute to promoting Frenchscience and culture internationally.

6. The surveys on the Collège’s different audiencesenabled us obtain the first overview on the subject in2010. It would be useful to carry out such surveysregularly so that we can see how these audiences evolveover time, and evaluate the services that we deliver.

The digital dissemination of knowledge has multipliedthe Collège de France’s audiences by a factor of 10 to100. The public concerned corresponds precisely to thetarget that the Collège wanted to attain: those listenerswhose presence is “virtual” yet very real, and who wantto acquire more in-depth knowledge in various researchfields.

The survey on Internet users is an encouragement toperpetuate and amplify this approach, by maintainingthe same high standards of teaching which make theCollège’s lectures so valuable and interesting, bothonline and on campus. For the Collège’s aim is not onlyto teach everyone, but also to give them the best. �

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Selected papers

The papers included in this issue of the Letter of the Collège de France in English were originally published in the

Lettre du Collège de France n° 27, 28 and 29 (academic year 2009–2010).

pages

� Opening of the chair of Information Technology and Digital Sciences 8

� Inaugural lectures (extracts)- Gérard BERRY—Information technology and Digital Sciences, Academic Year 2009–2010 9- Patrick COUVREUR—Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt, Academic Year 2009–2010 10- Antoine GEORGES—Physics of Condensed Matter 11- Jacques NICHET—Artistic Creation, Academic Year 2009–2010 12- Peter PIOT—Knowledge against Poverty, Academic Year 2009–2010 13- Nicholas STERN—Sustainable Development - Environment, Energy and Society,

Academic Year 2009–2010 14

� News of the chairs- Tahiti’s sea level and corals, Édouard Bard—Climate and Ocean Evolution 15- A new Chinese “Budé” collection, Anne Cheng—Intellectual History of China 16- The Making of Images (exhibition), Philippe Descola—Anthropology of Nature 17- Bioinspired chemistry and nanosciences, Marc Fontecave—Chemistry of Biological Processes 18- Funeral rites in Lugdunum (exhibition), Christian Goudineau—National Antiquities 19

� Guest lecturers- Democracy in American: conditions and conflicts in Tocqueville, Arthur Goldhammer 21- The first translation of the Analects in Europe, Thierry Meynard 22- Cognition, attention and consciousness: Synchrony in mind, Lawrence Ward 23

� Prizes and Distinctions- Ian HACKING, Holberg Prize 2009 (acceptance speech) 25- Serge HAROCHE, CNRS Gold Metal 2009 27

� Collège de France autumn symposium 2009:Darwins’s bicentenary, Profs Jean-Pierre Changeux, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Alain Prochiantz 28

� Other symposia and seminars- The Days of Jean Dausset, Profs Pierre Corvol, Philippe Kourilsky, Mr Laurent Degos 32- Rationality, Truth and Democracy: Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky

Profs Jacques Bouveresse, Noam Chomsky, Mr Jean-Jacques Rosat 36- Managing Climate Change, Professor Roger Guesnerie 39

� The Tragedy of the Haiti Earthquake, Professor Xavier le Pichon 42

� Obituary- Jean DAUSSET, Professor Philippe Kourilsky 44- Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, Professor Philippe Descola 46- Jean YOYOTTE, Professor Nicolas Grimal 49

� Léon Brillouin, From waves to information, Rémy Mosseri 51

Institutional News

� The General Library of the Collège de FranceMarie-Renée Cazabon, curator of the Library 54

� Paris Science and Humanities–Latin Quarter 56

� Who are the audiences of the Collège de France’s lectures?Professor Henri Leridon 57

Facts and Data

� Collège de France organization chart 62

� Lectures given by the Professors abroad 64

� Lectures and lecture series by foreign Professors 66

� Events at the Collège de France 2009–2010 71

� Research teams hosted 72

� Temporary positions at the Collège de France 2010–2011(Maîtres de conférences and ATER) 72

� The Collège de France Institutes 73

� C.I.R.B. 75

� Publications 2009–2010 76

� Collège de France autumn symposium 2010–2011 77

SELECTED

PAPERS

OPENING OF THE CHAIR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND

DIGITAL SCIENCES

The importance of computer sciencein our society is unquestionable. Ourworld is becoming increasinglydigital; that is obvious. Not a day goesby that each of us does not use adevice or service attesting to that,whether in our private or professionallives. We live in a world of computersor, more precisely, electronic circuits.Apart from our personal or officecomputer, we are surrounded bymachines that are part of this bigfamily: household appliances, cars,aeroplanes, mobile phones, etc., areall related to our computers. All haveelectronic chips that function on thebasis of software to perform a seriesof predefined tasks.

To the long list of objects withintegrated computer programs, wenaturally have to add the increasingnumber of services from which webenefit. After the introduction of thepersonal computer in the 1980s, theappearance of the Internet in the mid-90s triggered the most visibleupheaval by enabling hundreds ofmillions of machines to be connected.This constantly expandingnetworking has been attended by adigitization of data and of productsthat are potentially transferable onInternet. Data and medium are nowinseparable and, as such, haverevolutionized certain sectors like therecord industry.

These are examples from our dailylives, which reflect profound changein our society, for while we ‘consumedigital’, including our entertainment,we also ’produce digital’ and even

’think digital’. Very few objects andcomplex procedures today are not theproduct of computer-aided design.

Apart from digital engineering, digitalmodelling, simulation andvisualization have transformedpractically all scientific domains. Thedigital sciences are at the heart ofmost of the challenges requiringinterdisciplinary answers today.

The implications of the digitalrevolution are huge, from both aneconomic and a societal point of view.In France, first the announcement inearly April 2008 of a plan to developthe digital economy, with a view toranking France among the leading‘digital nations’ by 2012, and then,more recently, the controversy aroundthe drafting of the HADOPI law, areemblematic of the phenomenon. Thesetwo events highlight the economicweight associated with digitaltechnologies, on the one hand, and withevolving uses and the need to regulatethat evolution, on the other. Anestimated 28% of global research anddevelopment is devoted to informationand communication science andtechnologies (ICST). Whether the aimis to create value with the leading firmsor to regulate new uses related to newtechnologies, in order to ensure theiracceptance, the same condition applies:the need to understand the bases ofcomputing and to identify the principlesgoverning this digital world in which welive. Ignorance spawns the impossibilityof creating, as well as dependence oreven fear and mistrust of an unfamiliarworld.

From this point of view, explainingthe digitization of the world andgiving our fellow citizens the keysneeded to further their understandingof this new society become fullymeaningful. It is essential if they areto make sense of the environment inwhich they live, to accept it and tobecome actors in their own right andeven creators. I am convinced that the‘digital divide’ is more than simply aquestion of equipment; it is also amatter of thought patterns, of a dividein the capacity to adopt a differentway of grasping the world.

By creating a chair for Computer andDigital Science at the Collège deFrance, we are moving a step closer toacknowledging computer science as adiscipline in its own right, and arethus highlighting the importance ofdevoting more attention to it in theacademic world. It is no longerlegitimate to have to wait to specializein one’s post-school education toreceive an explanation of thefoundations of computing. Thisteaching should be imparted to peoplefrom a younger age. Starting this year,the mathematics programme in thefirst year of senior high school (lycée)in France will include one of the keyconcepts in computing: algorithms.This is a first step, which I salute, butwe need to go further in the samedirection. �

Mr Michel CosnardCEO of INRIA

On 10 November 2009 the Collège de France and the Frenchnational institute for research in computer science and control(INRIA, Institut national de recherche en informatique et automa-tique) presented the press with their objectives in creating a chairdevoted to computer and digital science.

From left to right : Professors Pierre-Louis Lions, Gérard Berry, Pierre Corvol and Mr MichelCosnard

8 THE LETTER OF THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE - N° 5

INAUGURAL LECTURES

Gérard BERRY

gave his inaugural lecture on19 November 2009.His course entitled “To think, model andcontrol calculation”began on 25 November 2009.

Extracts from the inaugural lecture:The current digital revolution is rooted inautomatic computation on digitallyencoded information. Since it deals withinformation instead of matter and energy,it is more comparable to the ancientrevolutions of writing and printing than tothe more recent industrial revolution.These former revolutions werecomprehensible by everybody since they allhad a directly visible material impact.Being mostly invisible, the digitalrevolution is much less comprehensible tothe public. In particular, the underlyingnotions of information digitization andautomatic computation remain eitherunknown or mysterious to most people.Who realizes that printing a document,giving a phone call, or piloting an airplaneare now based on the well-orderedexecution of billions or trillions ofelementary computations, the very samefor such different applications? Whoknows that mastering automaticcomputation is fundamentally difficult andrequires verifying in great details that theaforementioned myriads of elementarycomputations fully and faithfullyimplement their designer’s intention?

In this year at Collège de France, I willconcentrate on automatic computation asan object of scientific and technicalreflection. I will describe the differentprinciples at work, how they differentiatefrom each other, how to make themcooperate, and why it is necessary torecursively compute on computations tomake systems reliable. The basic principlesare of a theoretical nature: abstractmachines, programming concepts andlanguages, verification logics, etc. I will

take great care in linking these principlesto their practical impacts. In the digitalindustries as elsewhere, pragmatics reign,and engineers are often reluctant to changetheir methods unless they are obliged to byproject failures or costs escalations. Thus,the use of the advanced notions presentedin the course remains quite slow in manyplaces. However, it is becomingindispensable because of a sharp increaseof the cost of bugs and security problems,itself due to the explosion of the number,variety, and criticality of applications in acontext where machines and networksbecome more and more complex.

Informatics-based applications mustbecome more reliable. This requiresmodeling and mastering the core notion ofautomatic computation, object of thiscourse. But this is clearly not sufficient.One must also master many other subjects,ranging from theoretical algorithmics topractical software engineering. Indeed,many important recent innovations are dueto the better design of programminglanguages through data structures,modules, objects, aspects, etc. These willnot be considered here, since they changethe architecture and writing of programswithout deeply changing what concerns ushere, the way they compute at run-time.

Why did we mention several computationprinciples and models, while all computerslook alike and seem to differ only by theirbrand, their speed, and their cost? Becausewe need to distinguish between two highlydifferent levels: the human level, where wethink about computation with our slow,semi-rigorous, but intuitive brains, and theexecution level, performed by computersthat are superfast and superexact buttotally deprived of intuition. Mastering thepath between these two opposite ends isdifficult and requires understanding thevariety of conceptual and technical modelswe present here. �

CHAIR: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL SCIENCESACADEMIC YEAR 2009–2010

Researcher, FrenchNational Institute

for Research inComputer Science

and Control(INRIA)

Head of INRIA'sEvaluation

Commission.

The inaugural lecture isavailable from Editions

Fayard. The video isavailable on the

College de France website.

9N° 5 - THE LETTER OF THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE

Patrick COUVREUR

delivered his inaugural lecture on21 January 2010.His lecture series entitled“Nanomedicines” started on 25 January2010.

Extracts from the inaugural lecture:Nanotechnologies have appeared and theworld of the infinitely small hasrevolutionized the way of administeringmedicine. Because they are on a nanometricscale (1nm = 10–9m), nanotechnologies arenot simply miniaturized larger objects; theyhave properties found only on a scale ofthat size. Medicines are no exception. Untilthe early 1970s it was consideredimpossible to administer pharmaceuticalsuspensions (dispersion of solid particles ina liquid) by intravenous means, due to theobvious risks of embolism. Today, theconception of nanoparticles suspensionscontaining medicines (‘nanomedicines’) hasmade it possible to increase the therapeuticindex of many components (improvementof the activity, reduction of toxicity) bydirecting them selectively towards thediseased tissues and cells (‘drug targeting’).The shift in size from tens of microns totens or hundreds of nanometres has thusbeen a significant technological andmedical breakthrough.

In this inaugural lecture I wish to showthat the concepts of physico-chemistry, thedevelopment of new materials (synthesis ofnew polymers and new lipids, forexample), and better knowledge ofbiological targets enable us to conceive ofsub-micronic systems of administrationendowed with numerous functions andproperties; in short, to develop ‘intelligent’nanotechnologies which can contribute todiversifying our therapeutic arsenal in thetreatment of severe diseases.

Applied to drug targeting, thesenanotechnologies have a diametermidway between that of viruses andbacteria, thus resembling naturalparticles. It is moreover possible to create

‘intelligent’ nanotechnologies, for we nowhave a wide variety of materials andbiomaterials that can be implementedcleverly.

[…] The core of nanocarriers makes itpossible to encapsulate biologically activemolecules in order to make them ‘invisi-ble’ to detoxification mechanisms such asthose employed by cancer cells to resist tochemotherapy. The resistance mechanismsdeveloped by these cells can indeed resultin the expression of efflux proteins (PgP,MRP, etc.) which expel medicines fromthe cell. This so-called ‘multidrug resis-tance’ (MDR) neutralizes most classicalchemotherapeutic treatments. We had theidea of trying to circumvent this resistancemechanism by encapsulating doxorubicin(an anti-cancer intercalating agent ofDNA) in nanoparticles prepared from abiodegradable polymer, polyalkylcyanoa-crylate. In this form, the efflux proteinscan no longer recognize the doxorubicinand the cancer cells become sensitive to itagain. This concept has been applied tothe experimental treatment of resistanthepatocarcinoma because these nanopar-ticles, like all colloids, are recognized bythe liver (via Kupffer cells) after intrave-nous administration. The companyBIOALLIANCE has been developping thistechnology and a multicentric trial ofPhase II/III is currently underway.

[…] The core of nanotechnologies alsoallows for the encapsulation of fragilemolecules. ‘Biomimetic’ or stemming frombiotechnologies, macromolecules likeDNA, siRNA or antisense oligonucleo-tides, peptides and proteins offer signifi-cant therapeutic prospects. They may bethe basis of tomorrow’s therapeutic tech-niques (non-viral gene therapy, inhibitionof oncogenes or viral genes, targetedtherapeutics using antibodies, etc.), butbecause they are fragile, they need to beencapsulated into nanocarriers. �

CHAIR: TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION LILIANE BETTENCOURTACADEMIC YEAR 2009–2010

Professor ofPharmacotechnique

at Paris-SouthUniversity. Senior

member of theInstitut Universitairede France. In 2000,

set up the PhDschool for

“TherapeuticInnovation”.





Antoine GEORGES

gave his inaugural lesson on8 October 2009.His lecture series entitled“From supra-conductor oxides to coldatoms: matter with strong quantumcorrelations” started on 5 May 2010.

Extracts from the inaugural lecture(translated transcription):Since the Collège de France is a locus ofknowledge production, where theprofessors teach their own originalresearch, I would prefer this talk not toseem too much like a lecture .

I would therefore like you to listen to me asthough you were listening to someonerecounting their travels: a journey startingout from the extraordinary diversity oforganized forms of matter on a macroscopicscale, to its most minute components on anatomic scale.

[...] This journey starts in awe before thediversity of material that nature presents uswith or that chemists and physicists are ableto create. The carbon atom, with its sixelectrons around a core, is one of thesimplest of all atoms but also one of the

most essential elements of the livingworld. When a large number of theseatoms combine, they can form crystalstructures: the three-dimensionalarchitecture of diamonds or structuresconsisting of bi-dimensional layers ofgraphite. What an amazing differencethere is between the physicalproperties of these two structures,even though both consist of the sameelement: on the one hand, thediamond, transparent, extremely hardand providing good electricalisolation; on the other, graphite, a

black, flaky, layered composite that is usedin crayons and is almost metallic. Carboncan form even more remarkable structures,recently discovered or synthesized. The largemolecules, for example, calledBuckminsterfullerenes in homage to thearchitect Buckminsterfuller, the inventor of

geodesic domes, can consist of up to 60carbon molecules and have the form of afootball. These carbon nanotubes, small,very narrow and long tubes—their diameteris only a few nanometers, that is, a millionthof a millimetre—are obtained when a singlesheet of carbon atoms rolls itself up. Fiveyears ago, Geim and Novoselov isolated asheet of this kind, formed by a single layer ofcarbon atoms organized like a network ofhexagonal cells. This is graphene, the subjectof abundant research today.

And all these examples are of materialsformed by just one type of atom! What animmense playing field lies before us if weconsider the countless possibilities ofcombining the elements on Mendeleev’speriodic table. One example is an oxidecomposed of four different atoms—copper, oxygen, lanthanum andstrontium—which can occupy the samesites . It has the remarkable property ofbecoming a supra-conductor above acertain temperature, which means that itcan convey an electric current withoutany resistance or dissipation. Anotherexample is cobalt oxide, in which smallalkaline lithium ions circulate betweensheets of cobalt oxide atoms, and whichis essential to the batteries of our mobilephones and laptop computers.

There is not only perfect crystal—thatstructure which in a sense is more likematter as it should be than matter as it is.The organized matter that nature presentsus with or that is born in the laboratoriesof chemists adopts extraordinarily diverseforms: gels, mousses, liquid crystals, andmany more. […] As the term solid statephysics proved to be too limited toencompass all these forms, condensedmatter physics is the term that tookprevalence in the 1970s to denote the fieldof physics that studies the structure andproperties of the organized forms ofmatter. I chose to keep this title for thechair, to show my interest in thisextraordinary variety of forms. �

CHAIR: PHYSICS OF CONDENSED MATTER

Head of the PhysicsDepartment of the

École Polytechnique(2006–2009).

CNRS SilverMedal (2007).





Jacques NICHET

delivered his inaugural lecture on11 March 2010.His lecture series entitled “Theatre doesnot exist” started on 18 March 2010.

Presentation of the series:Over the past four decades we havewitnessed numerous singularmetamorphoses of theatre, which haveshaken and boldly overturned thetraditions of the dramatic arts. Whatexplains such changes? What are thedifferent ways in which these unforeseenforms, these unknown visions, have beeninvented? Luca Ronconi, ArianeMnouchkine, Peter Schumann, RobertWilson, François Tanguy, Tadeusz Kantor,Denis Marleau, Valère Novarina, PinaBausch and many others wrenched mefrom my usual self with my certainties,filled me with enthusiasm, shook, movedand astounded me, sometimes irritatedme. It is hardly surprising that in themidst of so many divergent models, thepublic sometimes feels lost. What is itseeing? Is this still theatre? Sometimes aplay triggers controversy amongst boththe public and critics: while some criticizethe director in the name of murdered art,others acclaim him/her in the name ofrevived art.

Over a century ago, Zola advised theartists caught in the controversies of theday: ‘Every time someone wants toconfine you to a code by saying: this istheatre, this is not theatre, reply outright:theatre [as such] does not exist. There aretheatres and I’m looking for mine’.

This type of approach does indeed spawnonly singular, dissimilar, temporary forms.And Zola firmly emphasizes: ‘There is noabsolute, ever, in any art whatsoever! Ifthere is theatre, a fashion has created ittoday and a fashion will destroy ittomorrow!’

Zola’s claims have never been as relevantas they are today. In response to the

disruptions and fragmentation of a worldthat is defying our references, plays areproliferating and becoming increasinglydifferentiated. They endeavour to echoour painful impressions of disorientationand uncertainty. The artists, each in theirown way, try to react through differentpractices, alliances and modes ofproduction.

We witnessed large numbers of unusualcreations that sought to mark theirdifference from the productions of theestablished institutions.

By asserting their originality, theseexperiments have shown other ways ofinventing theatre.

My greatest pleasure would be to relive theshock of a surprise, the upsurge of emotionlike the first time, the evening when we sawOrlando Furioso by Luca Ronconi,1789–1793 by Ariane Mnouchkine and theThéâtre du Soleil, A Man says Goodbye tohis Mother and Fire by Peter Schumannand the Bread and Puppet Theatre,Deafman Glance by Robert Wilson, DeadClass by Tadeusz Kantor, The Blind deMaeterlinck in the phantasmagoria ofDenis Marleau, The Unknown Act byValère Novarina, and Café Müller andBarbe-Bleue by Pina Bausch. Forty yearsago all these shows were unimaginable, but‘if you can imagine it, you can do it’ saidthe sculptor Calder. All it took was an artistto imagine it one day. �

CHAIR: ARTISTIC CREATIONACADEMIC YEAR 2009–2010

Founder of theThéâtre de

l’Aquarium and thecompany

l’Inattendu.Director of the

Théâtre Nationalde Toulouse1998–2007.

The inaugural lecture willbe available from Editions




Peter PIOT

delivered his inaugural lecture on7 January 2010. His lecture series entitled “The Aidsepidemic and the globalization of risks”started on 5 February 2010.

Extracts from his inaugural lecture:A virus that was totally unknown less than30 years ago has overturned schemas onprogress in health and socio-economicdevelopment in many countries, especially insub-Saharan Africa. In three decades, somesixty million people have been infected bythe HIV—the human immunodeficiencyvirus—of which some twenty-five millionhave died so far. These tens of millions ofpeople were linked to one another via sexualrelations, exposure to contaminated bloodproducts or needles, or because their motherwas infected with the HIV. Genetic andepidemiological studies have moreovershown that everything probably started withonly one person and a single virus. All thishighlights another side of globalization—and a new dimension of the concept ofblood relatives!

[…] The Aids epidemic has pursued itsglobal expansion for three decades. Today,33.4 million people are living with the HIV;in 2008, 2.7 million new infections werecontracted and there were two milliondeaths. Who could have predicted the worstpandemic in modern history since theSpanish Flu when, in June 1981, the WeeklyMorbidity Mortality Report of the AtlantaCenter for Disease Control published a shortarticle on a syndrome of unknown origin,characterized by a rare form of pneumoniacaused by pneumocystis carinii in five blackhomosexual men in the United States?

This is a classical dilemma in public health:when a few cases of a new disease aredetected, will these cases remain isolated orare they the beginning of an epidemic? Theexperiences of Aids, SARS and bovinespongiform encephalopathy, in particular,introduced the precautionary principle intopublic health. Its most recent application

was the campaign against the H1N1 flu. Wecan legitimately wonder how many millionsof infections by the HIV and how manydeaths could have been avoided, had healthauthorities and policy-makers applied thisprecautionary principle on a global scalefrom the beginning of the Aids epidemic,and implemented all the means deployed inrecent years.

[…] It has been in the field of access totreatment that progress has been the mostspectacular. At the end of 2008, four millionpeople in low- and medium-incomecountries benefited from antiretroviraltreatment. Although this accounts for only42% of the needs, a lot of ground has beencovered: in the year 2000, fewer than200,000 people were receiving antiretroviraltreatment in developing countries. Themajority were in Brazil, the first developingcountry to offer free care to HIV-infectedpeople. […] When it comes to prevention,progress has been less spectacular, eventhough many countries have experienced adrop in the number of new HIV infections.Globally, for each new patient put undertreatment, almost three new HIV infectionsoccur somewhere in the world, as though wewere constantly losing the race against thevirus.

[…] Once again, ‘scientific evidence’ doesnot automatically mean ‘acceptance’ and‘action’. A great deal of science is lost intranslation. We have found this in manysectors of health. For instance, theinternational convention on tobacco controlwas approved by the member states of theWHO more than fifty years after thecorrelation between tobacco smoking andlung cancer was proved by Doll and Hill.This failure to act has resulted and continuesto result in millions of deaths. To eliminatepoverty, the world probably needs theapplication of science even more than itneeds knowledge against poverty! �

Professor of GlobalHealth and Director

of the Institute forGlobal Health at

the Imperial Collegein London.

Executive Directorof the Joint United

Nations Programmeon HIV/Aids(1995–2008.

CHAIR: KNOWLEDGE AGAINST POVERTYACADEMIC YEAR 2009–2010

The Chair receives support from theAgence Francaise de Développement (AFD)





Nicholas STERN

delivered his inaugural lecture on4 february 2010.His lecture series entitled “manageclimate change, promote growth,development and equity”started on 5 February 2010.

Extracts from his inaugural lecture:The world, the planet, is at a crossroads. If wefail to act strongly now to reduce emissions ofgreenhouse gases, if we continue with thepattern of high-carbon growth of the lastcentury, we incur grave risks of a catastrophicdestruction of the physical geography of theplanet. The implications would likely be the re-drawing of where people could live and howthey could live their lives: thus we riskmovements of population on a massive scale,with the probable consequence of severe,extended and global conflict. Inaction is themost pernicious of policies. But it is all too easya path in a world dominated by the politics ofthe short term, narrow self-interest and asuspicion of others.

There is another, and very attractive route. Ifwe act together as a world, strongly,collaboratively, creatively, justly, we cancreate a new era of low-carbon growth anddevelopment. It will be more energy-efficient, more energy-secure, moreequitable, safer, quieter, cleaner and morebio-diverse. We can create a new definitionof, criteria for, and approach to developmentthat will be far more attractive than whathas gone before. Further, the transition tolow-carbon growth could be the mostdynamic and innovative period in worldhistory. On the other hand, high-carbongrowth will kill itself: first on high prices forhydro-carbons and second, and morefundamentally, on the very hostile physicalenvironment it would create.

The choice is ours and it is urgent. We canidentify the scale of action necessary—thetopic of the next section—the areas of actionand the necessary technologies. Weunderstand the basic economic policies toencourage the reduction of emissions—the

topic of section 2. The challenge now iscreating the political will. We saw inCopenhagen in December 2009 just howdifficult that can be. We will not create, ordeserve to create, the necessary political willand collaboration, unless we recognise thatthere are two defining problems of thiscentury: managing climate change andovercoming world poverty. We will succeedor fail on these two together. Creating aninternational agreement will be the topic ofsection 3. The sequence of these sectionsreflects the structure of the course.

Analysis and the making of policy on climatechange must start with an examination ofthe consequences of various forms of actionand indeed of inaction. The problem startswith the actions of people in their daily livesand their consequences influence directly thecapability of people to live their lives. Thechain of causation is the following. Step 1:through their activities, in production andconsumption, people cause the emissions ofgreenhouse gases. The emissions have, formuch of the last century or more, beenabove the level that the planet can absorb via‘the carbon cycle’. Step 2: the flows thereforeresult in an increase in the stock orconcentrations of greenhouse gases in theatmosphere. Step3: the increased concentrationsof greenhouse gases in the atmosphere implythat more heat radiating from the earth istrapped in the atmosphere and temperaturerises. The magnitude of the increase isshaped by the ‘climate sensitivity’. This isglobal warming. Step 4: global warmingcauses climate change. This manifests itselfin large measure through water in someshape or form: storms and hurricanes; floodsand inundations; droughts anddesertification; sea-level rise and changingflows and courses of rivers. Step 5: theseclimate changes have an impact on peoples’lives and livelihoods to which they will haveto adapt in some way or another. In manycases, the impacts will re-define wherepeople can live and thus adaptation, formany, will involve dislocation andmigration. �

CHAIR: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - ENVIRONMENT, ENERGYAND SOCIETYACADEMIC YEAR 2009–2010

Doctor inEconomics,

Oxford University,professor at the

London School ofEconomics andmember of the

British Academy.




The chair receives support from TOTAL.


NEWS OF THE CHAIRS

We are currently studying in detail thevariations of the sea level during the lastdeglaciation which led to a massive rise inglobal sea levels of about 120 meters.During this period, many other climaticand oceanographic parameters underwentconsequential change: a global warming ofaround 5° C, a rise of approximately 40%in the levels of greenhouse gases (carbondioxide and methane) in the atmosphere, afall in wind speeds, a reorganisation ofocean currents, etc.

Our new study focuses on the core of thisperiod (from 14,000 to 9,000 years ago),using the uranium-thorium datingtechnique on many fossilised corals fromTahiti’s barrier reef. During those fivemillennia the sea level rose by more than50 m, that is, the equivalent of all ofAntarctica’s ice today pouring into theocean. The average pace of rising sea levelswas approximately one centimetre everyyear, which is three times more than iscurrently measured by satellite.

With an unprecedented number ofsamples, we have been able todemonstrate that this rate of increase iscorrelated with global climaticphenomena, notably the succession ofwarm and cold phases. In particular, weobserve a slowing down in the rise of sea-levels during the Younger Dryas cold eventand a subsequent acceleration during theHolocene warm period.

These studies have many implications forseveral domains of climatology,geophysics and other disciplines. Theexact chronology of the core of thedeglaciation is essential in order toestimate the phase shift between theclimate forcing and the variations of theglobal average temperature and sea level.It is also crucial for estimating the dates atwhich coastal areas and certain importantbasins were submerged: creation of the

Bering Strait and of the straits of the Sea ofJapan, immersion of the Black Sea and ofthe Persian Gulf (and the legendsassociated with the Flood), the closing ofthe Cosquer cave, etc.

Several authors have established semi-empirical relations between the sea levelrise and the global temperature fordifferent time scales ranging from the lastcentury to several millennia. This kind ofstatistical relation was even used toreassess the IPCC (IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change) projections forthe next centuries. There is however somescientific debate concerning theuncertainties of this kind of approach.Our finding of a correlation between thesea level and temperatures will be used inthat context and in real models simulatingicecaps.

Our data on Tahiti’s sea level will also beintegrated into numerical modelssimulating the glacio-hydro-isostaticpostglacial readjustment, which alters theshape of the earth. An ice sheet severalkilometres thick creates a depression of theearth’s crust of about a kilometre, whichleads to movements of mass on a largescale and even to a variation in themoment of inertia of our planet and assuch in the length of day. These variationsproduce a similar effect to that of an iceskater spinning and spreading his or herarms out or drawing them back in.

This geophysical aspect is also crucial forcorrecting the recent data provided by tidegauges and by altimetry and gravimetrysatellites. The parameters of these modelsare adjusted to correspond to long timeseries of sea level, notably what we areproducing by dating corals. Studiesreaching until the middle of thedeglaciation are very rare (half a dozen inthe world) and the Tahiti record is the onlyone for the Pacific. �

CLIMATE AND OCEAN EVOLUTION

Professor Édouard Bard

Tahiti's sea level and coralsAbout a study published in the journal Science on 5 March 2010

Bard E., Hamelin B.,Delanghe-Sabatier D.

“Deglacial melt water pulse1B and Younger Dryas sea-

levels revisited with newonshore boreholes at Tahiti”,

Science 327,1235–1237 (2010).

Contact:Édouard Bard

[email protected]

© IRD J. Orempüller


The “Bibliothèque chinoise” (Chinese Library),inaugurated by the Belles Lettres in March2010, was born from a long-standing dream,that of creating a Chinese equivalent to thefamous “Budé” collection of Greek and Latintexts. It was also the result of the meeting thattook place in 2007 between two representativesof the Belles Lettres publishing house, itsdirector Caroline Noirot and its coordinatorMarie-José d’Hoop, and two sinologists, AnneCheng who holds the chair of Intellectualhistory of China at the Collège de France andMarc Kalinowski who teaches ancient andmedieval Chinese cultural history at the ÉcolePratique des Hautes Études.

The prime ambition of the “Bibliothèquechinoise” is to bring forward in scholarly Frenchtranslations a wide range of texts written inclassical Chinese in every field of the arts andsciences without any restriction (be itphilosophy, history, literature, poetry, politicaland military treatises, but also medicine,astronomy, mathematics, etc.). The texts will beselected both for their stylistic quality and fortheir impact on the Chinese cultural world, thusoffering the non-specialized readership a directaccess to the most representative works of thatvast written literature, ranging from the timesof Confucius in the 6th–5th centuries B.C. downto the modern era in the early 20th century.

The collection will not be limited to Chinesetexts, but will be open to other cultural areassuch as Korea, Japan or Vietnam, that havemade use of classical Chinese as a languagecommon to literati elites, just as Europeanscholars have used Latin as a lingua francafrom the Middle Ages down to theEnlightenment period.

Following the model of the Greek and Latin“Budé”, the texts will be presented in abilingual edition, with the Chinese originalfacing its French translation, preceded by adetailed introduction and assorted with asubstantial critical apparatus (explanatory andphilological footnotes, chronologies, glossaries,indexes), not with the aim of showing offpedantic erudition, but of guiding andfacilitating the task of the reader.

This project has already elicited an enthusiasticresponse from numerous colleagues of allgenerations, from the masters who trained us tothe young researchers who will replace us. Itwill draw on every competence available andmake accessible to the wider audience thewealth and diversity not only of Far Easternsources, but also of the disciplinary methodsenacted to approach them in the French-speaking context (let us not forget that modernEuropean sinology was born with the creationin 1814 of a chair in Chinese and Tartar-Manchu at the Collège de France).

The first two titles of the collection arerepresentative of the Han dynasty which lastedfour centuries (from the 2nd century B.C. to the2ndcentury A.D.) and established the institutionsof the first centralized empire together with thepax sinica, parallel to the pax romana at theother end of the Eurasian continent. Rendered inJean Levi’s translation, the Debate on salt andiron (Yantielun) vividly records the discussionsheld at the imperial court in 81 BC on statemonopolies and the art of rulership. As to theFayan (Masterly words) written by the greatthinker Yang Xiong (53 BC–18 AD) andtranslated by Béatrice L’Haridon, it is conceivedas a brilliant pastiche of Confucius’s Analects. Itis worth noting that these two titles were firstpresented to the public at the Fondation Hugotand benefited from a subsidy granted by theCollège de France which thus manifests itssupport to an undertaking so obviously faithfulto its motto Docet omnia: it endeavours tointroduce the sources in classical Chinese into thehumanities, thereby making them accessible toboth students and open-minded spirits and,eventually, extracting them from theirsupposedly irreducible “otherness”. �

A new Chinese “Budé” collection enters the Belles Lettres

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF CHINA

Professor Anne Cheng

The two first books of thecollection.


The purpose of this exhibition is to presentwhat is not directly apparent in an image, thatis, the effects that the creators wished to conveyto their intended audience. In some cases, theseeffects are perceptible through the ages anddespite cultural diversity: as long as what theyrepresent is recognisable, images that are eitherextremely old or come from afar can awaken inus desire, fear, disgust, pity, amusement or even,quite simply, curiosity. Most often these effectsare overlooked, however, as the conventionsguiding their representation are unfamiliar tothe 21st century museum-goer whoseperception has been shaped, mostly, by thetraditions of Western art.

The hypothesis underlying this exhibition is thatthe representation of such effects relates to fourmajor figurative strategies. These correspond tofour ways of rendering evident in these imagesa particular set of qualities associated with theobjects of the world. Traditionally known as‘ontologies’, these specific sets of qualities servethe purpose of identifying different groups ofbeings distinguished from one another bydifferences in their common characteristics.However, not all cultures have the sameontology. For example, sheep, cars or transgenicsoya beans are not legal entities in Europe andin the United States (they are not represented inparliament, do not have any inalienable rights,cannot be taken to court, etc.) because they areconsidered to be utterly different from humanbeings. On the other hand, in other regions ofthe world it is considered normal to ask of ahunted animal not to seek revenge (Amazonia)or to whip a mountain to punish it for itsmisbehaviour (Mongolia).

There are four main ontologies in the world, sofour different ways of perceiving the continuityand discontinuity that exist between things.

In our own ontology—the naturalistontology that has prevailed in the West sincethe classical era—humans are distinguishedfrom all other beings and things becausethey are believed to be the only ones to have

an interiority (a mind, soul and subjectivity),even though they share with non-humanscertain material characteristics (the physical-chemical processes of their bodies).

In the tradition of animist ontology (in theAmazon, the northern parts of North America,certain parts of South-east Asia and ofMelanesia), the opposite is true: many animals,plants and objects are thought to have aninterior depth similar to that of human beings,while differences between one another arisefrom differences in the physical form.

In the totemic ontology (found amongstAustralian Aborigines for example), certainhumans and non-humans within a particularclass share the same physical and moralqualities that arise from a prototype, while stilldiffering from other similar classes.

Finally, in analogist ontologies, all theinhabitants of the world—and this includestheir elementary components—are said to bedifferent from one another, which explains whywe seek corresponding links between them(China, Europe during the Renaissance,western Africa, the Andes, Mesoamerica, etc.).The aim of this exhibition is to convey howeach of these four ontologies is able to represent,in other words to highlight and activate in theseimages, the kinds of entities that they focus onin the world, the relations that these entitiesestablish between one another, and theproprieties that are associated with them. �

The Making of ImagesExhibition at the Musée du quai Branly16 February 2010 - 11 July 2011Philippe Descola, curator of the exhibition

ANTHROPOLOGY OF NATURE

Professor Philippe Descola

Acrylic painting“Dream of the two Men”

© Musée du quai Branly, photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado.


There is no doubt that the most abundantrenewable energy source, far superior tothe potential contributions of wind energy,geothermal energy or hydroelectric power,is solar energy. A way to exploit this energyis to convert it into chemical energy, tostore it in the form of a chemical fuel,hydrogen for example. Hydrogen is a veryattractive alternative to oil, because of thelarge amount of energy it releases duringits oxidation (fuel cells) and because theonly by-product of this oxidation is water.

The conversion of solar energy into fuel isin fact carried out wonderfully by theliving world, which continuously uses thesun to transform water and carbondioxide into molecules with a high energyvalue, found in biomass. Certain livingorganisms, like micro-algae orcyanobacteria, even have the capacity tocarry out simple water photolysis. Theyuse solar energy to transform water intooxygen and hydrogen. Because water doesnot absorb the sun’s photons and becausethe processes used in this photolysis arecomplex multi-electronic processes,microorganisms achieve this amazing featthanks to the incredibly sophisticated andefficient enzymatic systems they possessfor collecting these photons, convertingthe light absorption into chemical energyand catalysing the electron transferreactions, namely the photosystem for theoxidation of water into oxygen and thehydrogenases for the reduction of waterinto hydrogen. What is remarkable is thatthese systems use abundant metals likemanganese, nickel and iron for catalysiswhile today water electrolysis devices orfuel cells function exclusively with noblemetals, like platinum, which are expensiveand not very abundant in the earth’s crust.We often forget to point out that ahydrogen economy has no future if we donot resolve these major catalysis issues.

These enzymes are, for the chemists, afascinating source of inspiration and it iswithin our reach to “copy” them andinvent new catalysts displaying some ofthe remarkable structural and functionalproperties of the enzyme active sites. Thisunique approach is called bio-inspiredchemistry. It has been developped withgreat success in the Laboratoire de Chimieet biologie des métaux (CEA-CNRS-Université J. Fourier, CEA Grenoble), incollaboration with a group of theLaboratoire de Chimie des surfaces etinterfaces (CEA Saclay) and a group ofthe Laboratoire d’Innovation pour lestechnologies des énergies nouvelles et lesnanomatériaux (CEA Grenoble). Bycombining the bioinspired chemistryapproach and nanosciences, we were ableto design an original material capable, inelectrochemical devices, to catalyze, likeplatinum, both the production ofhydrogen from water (for use inelectrolysers) and its oxidation (for use infuel cells). This material is based on asmall nickel complex, sharing somestructural characteristics with the activesite of hydrogenases, which has beengrafted on carbon nanotubes, selected fortheir great potential bonding surface andfor their remarkable electrical conductivity.Adsorbed on an electrode, thesefunctionalized nanotubes are very stableand efficient catalysts, working withoutoverpotential, in acidic medium, and thuscompatible with the proton exchangemembrane technology extensively used infuel cells. Even though the achievedcurrent densities are still too small, butimprovable, this type of electrode materialmight open new possibilities for thedevelopment of the future hydrogeneconomy. �

Professor Marc Fontecave, Vincent Artero

Référence: From hydrogenases to noblemetal-free catalytic nanomaterial for H2 production and uptake, Le Goff A., Artero V., Jousselme B.,

Tran P. D., Guillet N., Métayé R., Fihri A., Palacin S., Fontecave M., (2009), Science, 326, p. 1384–1387.

Bioinspired chemistry and nanosciences: towards new catalysts forproduction and oxidation of hydrogen

CHEMISTRY OF BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Professor Marc Fontecave

In the centre a nickel complex, graftedat the surface of a carbon nanotube,

reproduces some characteristics ofNi-Fe (left) and Fe-Fe (right) hydrogenases

and catalyses the proton-hydrogeninterconversion,

liplatinum.


Professor Christian Goudineau has beengiven responsibility for planning anexhibition organized at the Lyon-FourvièreGallo-Roman museum and entitled“Funeral Rites in Lugdunum”. It wasaccompanied by a book, a visitor’s bookletand several audio-visual documents.

Not only has the city of Lyon, thanks to thepersistent efforts of scholars andantiquarians, preserved many remarkablemonuments, such as mausoleums, steles,and large inscribed altars, but in the lasttwenty years, before major urbandevelopment work could be authorized, anumber of archeological digs were set up,and they have brought to light thousandsof tombs of the Roman period. It wastherefore possible to present the results ofrecent research together with olderdiscoveries.

Thanks to a lavish use of space andresources, seldom found in an archeologicalmuseum, we have opted for areconstitution of the complete procedure

from death to burial. The deceasedbelonged to the Roman colony’s highsociety. He was an important merchant anda member of the municipal government. Inthe atrium of his house we have staged thefuneral wake, with the ceremonial couch,lights, floral decoration and relatives inattendance. Then a series of life-size panelspainted by Jean-Claude Golvin, researchdirector at the CNRS, picture theprocession which accompanies the hearseto the necropolis.

Coming after jugglers, mime artists,musicians, professional mourningwomen, the hearse was followed by the

NATIONAL ANTIQUITIES

Professor Christian Goudineau

Post mortemFuneral rites in Lugdunum,An exhibition at the Gallo-Roman Museumin Lyon27 November 2009–30 May 2010Professor Christian Goudineau, highcommissioner for the exhibition.

The funeral pyre, with the deceased and the offerings.In the background, reproduction of a mausoleum.

Next to the pyre, a table for the frugal banquet which accompanies the cremation.In the background, on the left, an oven.

The book published for the exhibition.


family, the local officials, the “clients”and associates.

The funeral pyre stood at the entrance tothe necropolis. It was adorned with drapes,flowers, all sorts of offerings, especially offood, and beside it was a table set for thebanquet, with an oven to warm up or cooksome of the food. After that display, thevisitor sees what is left of the pyre after thefire has gone out. He is told how theremains of the bones and the burnt-outofferings are now sorted and transferred toa lead, glass or ceramic urn which will beplaced in the definitive tomb and againsurrounded by new offerings. The form ofthat tomb will depend on the socialstanding of the deceased: on top of it wouldbe a simple mark, an altar, an inscribedstele which may weigh several tons, andpossibly a sumptuous mausoleum.

It has been our intention that the visitorwould feel he is walking through anecropolis of the second century A. D.Cremation is practically the only rite.Burial is only for new-born babies and fora few families observing their own time-honoured tradition. The number ofburials will increase gradually from theend of the second century, to become themost frequent rite in the third century.

This is not due to Christianity, butbecause, from the time of Antoninus, theimperial family spread this new fashion.Some remarkable finds include tombswith shelves for placing offerings, burialplaces for dogs and conduits for libationsto the dead, which prove that ceremoniesin memory of the dead were taking placeregularly.

The last section of the exhibition presentsthe scientific evidence which supports thereconstructions, together with someexceptional finds such as those of Martres-de-Veyre, near Clermont-Ferrand, with acoffin in perfect condition, the hair and theclothes of a dead woman.

Audio-visual presentations explain thearcheological methods, the anthropologicalanalyses and the study of the material. Adocumentary film presents the practice ofcremation in India today and anothersummarises all the data. Sarah Rey,research fellow seconded to thedepartment, has collected the most relevanttexts about funeral rites in classicalantiquity. �

Picture credits: gallo-romain museum,Lyon-Fourvière.

Funeral altar bearing a greeting tothe passer-by in Greek on the topbelt-course: “Hail and good health”.

Infant buried in a vase.

Funeral furnishings (personal belongings): golden bulla, ring andpendant, wooden comb and shoes.

After the cremation, what is left ofthe bones and offerings is gatheredtogether (here into a glass urn) andwill be placed in the tomb with otherofferings.

Offerings placed in thetomb: a representation of

Venus in white clay.


GUEST LECTURERS

Our starting point is a reflection ontwo Tocquivillian phrases that areeasy to translate but come upagainst cultural obstacles to theirfull understanding: the ‘equality ofconditions’ and ‘the greatestnumber’ which, for Tocqueville,sometimes meant ‘the majority’ butsometimes also ‘the people’ asopposed to ‘the elite’. Here wecatch Tocqueville red-handed: hefreely uses ‘these abstract termswhich abound in democraticlanguages, and which are used onevery occasion without attachingthem to any particular fact, enlargeand obscure the thoughts they areintended to convey; they render themode of speech more succinct andthe idea contained in it less clear’.

The translator is fully aware thatthe apparent simplicity of theseexpressions can indeed ‘blurthinking’. In fact, they are thesource of what we take to be a blindspot in Tocqueville’s thinking. Theproblem is however that theseexpressions are actually lessabstract than they seem to be. Theyare linked to particular facts, butsurreptitiously, so to speak, andunknown to Tocqueville himself.Moreover, these particular factsconcern non-democratic societies.This confusion in Tocqueville’smind prevented him from seeing indemocratic society what he clearlydiscerned in the society of ordersthat preceded it, i.e. the roots ofsocial discord and the use thatpower made of it.

The institutions and orders of theAncien Regime served as afoundation for an edifice ofambitions, desires and rivalries thatspawned discord in many respects.Tocqueville endeavoured to analysethe mechanisms of this discord indetail and to explain how the royalpowers used it. But when he turnedto democratic society, he sawnothing but an undifferentiatedmass: ‘the greatest numbers’ wasnothing but ‘dust’, as he put it. Itwas consequently difficult for himto reflect on real political conflict oreven to grant an appropriate placeto those parties that were becomingboth its symbols and its agents.

This shortcoming in Tocqueville’ssociology of democracy is found inother thinkers of the ‘egalitarianliberal’ tradition, notably Americanphilosopher John Rawls. Ittherefore seems that the blind spotof liberal political philosophy is theorigin both of social discord and ofthe power that takes advantage ofit. Finally, a concrete example fromUS history shows us that the realroot of social discord in democracyis not the contradiction betweenequality in principle and actualinequality, which is impregnable,but rather the appearance of whatwe call the feeling of inequitywithin a balance that may haveseemed temporarily equitable. Butthis feeling is neither stable norobjective. It depends on normswhich evolve over time, and we seehow the introduction of new norms

of equity becomes the main driverof democratic political life. �

Arthur GOLDHAMMERProfessor at Harvard University (United States)invited by the Assembly of the Professorson the proposition of Professor Pierre Rosanvallon.He gave in May 2010 one lecture entitled:Democracy in American: conditions and conflicts in Tocqueville.


The publication in Paris ofConfucius, Philosopher of theChinese (Confucius SinarumPhilosophus, 1687) marked thebeginning of European sinology.This work, which may truly becalled an encyclopedia of Chinesethought, was the result of onehundred years of collective effortsby Jesuit missionaries in China.Notably, it presented the Analectsof Confucius, translated into Latinand presented with commentariesfrom the Song and Ming dynasties,in Europe for the first time. Thebook spread the name ofConfucius, a Latin transliteration ofMaster Kong, throughout Europe.It subsequently had a greatinfluence on intellectuals such asPierre Bayle, Malebranche, Leibniz,and Voltaire, imposing upon themthe image of a philosophicalChina—an image which remaineduntil the beginning of thenineteenth century.

First, we examined earlier translationsof Confucian texts into Westernlanguages, such as the Sapientia Sinica(1662) and the Sinarum ScientiaPolitico-moralis (1668–1669). Thesetranslations were initially used asmanuals for teaching language andculture, then as documentary evidencein support of the missionary policy ofinculturation. The decision to provideliteral, word for word, translationsallowed Jesuits to remain close to theoriginal meaning of the texts, even ifthere were, at times, some inflectionsin those meanings.

We then examined the editorialdecision to present the classical text

together with its interlinearcommentaries in the SinarumPhilosophus. We showed that thismethod of combining a classicaltext with its commentaries wassupported by a long hermeneuticaltradition in China. We asked howthis method was different from theway in which the Classics were readin Europe, and what kind ofrelationship it may have producedwith the text.

Moving from form to content, weanalyzed the image of Confucius asfound in the translation, andcompared it with that found in theclassical text and its Chinesecommentaries. In particular, weraised the following question: is thepresentation of Confucius as aphilosopher grounded in the classicaltext, or is it a pure construction,deprived of any basis? At the sametime, Confucius is qualified as holy(sanctus) in the translation. Howmay we understand the meaning ofthis denomination, related both tothe Chinese interpretative traditionand to Christian dogma?

Continuing our comparison of the Latintranslation with the Chinese texts, wethen investigated its presentation ofcertain core Confucian ideas. Forexample, the cardinal virtue of Ren isessentially described from theperspective of its Neo-Confucianuniversalistic interpretation, suggestinga correspondence with Christian charity.Similarly, the interpretation of the notionof will, central to the Confucian projectof moral transformation, suggests strongsimilarities with the theme, both Stoicand Christian, of victory over the self.

Finally, the conception of politicalpower found in the translation, even ifrooted in the imperial order of theMing dynasty, can also be readaccording to the political ideals of theJesuits. In the three areas of morality,transformation of the self and politics,this translation of the Analects showsConfucius to be a potent andemblematic figure, who enabled adialogue between Neo-Confucianismand Classical European thought totake place. This was the first attemptto provide this dialogue with aphilosophical foundation, and wasmade possible by the identification ofthe Neo-Confucian li (or principle ofcoherence) with the European ratio. �

Thierry MEYNARDAssociate Professor at the Sun Yat-Sen University (Canton, China)invited by the Assembly of the Professorson the proposition of Professor Anne Cheng.He gave in February 2010 one lecture entitled:Confucius Sinarum Philosophus,The first translation of the Analects in Europe.


1. Neural synchronization andcognition

Arguably the preeminent task ofcognitive neuroscience is to explainhow the brain implements cognitiveprocesses such as perception,attention, memory, decision-making,and consciousness. It is becomingcommonplace to propose that suchcognitive processes are implementedthrough the activity of networks offunctionally specialized brainregions, forming and dissolving ona time scale of tens to hundreds ofmilliseconds. In this first lecture Iwill review some of the currentknowledge about one mechanismthat is likely to be deeply involvedin forming and dissolving thesenetworks, and in the communicationwithin them: neural synchronization.Neural synchronization refers tothe idea that oscillations of activity,within a particular narrow band offrequencies, of one group ofneurons can become transientlyphase-locked with that in anothergroup of neurons. Such transientphase locking can play a number ofroles, including facilitatingcommunication of informationbetween the neural groups and evenperforming computational functions.Modulations of theta (4–7 Hz),alpha (8–15 Hz), and gamma(30–50 Hz) synchronization in theEEG and MEG, both within andbetween brain regions, have allbeen shown to be associated withcognitive function, includingperception, memory, attention, andconsciousness. I will review a few ofthe most important of these results,and then discuss in detail one such

result from my own laboratoryinvolving detection of changes inthe ongoing stimulus environment.

2. Neural synchronization andattention

The brain networks involved inorienting spatial attention have beenelucidated to some extent. Just howthese networks accomplish orienting,however, is still under investigation.It is proposed that neuralsynchronization plays an importantrole in the organization and functionof these networks. I will describesome recent results from mylaboratory that begin to describe thetemporal dynamics within the dorsalnetwork of brain regions that orientsvoluntary attention. Presentation of acue as to where in space a targetstimulus will occur begins a cascadeof processes that involvessynchronization of frontal andparietal regions with each other, andof parietal regions with sensorycortex, as well as changes insynchronization within those areas.Several of these changes happenregardless of target modality exceptfor the substitution of the relevantsensory region. In particular, in visualorienting, a lateralized increase insynchronization in the gamma bandoccurs transiently around 250–300ms after cue onset, and an increase inalpha band synchronization beginsaround that time and continues untiltarget onset. Moreover, local alpha-band synchronization increases inoccipital cortex ipsilateral to thetarget location and decreasescontralateral to it, indicating that localand long-distance synchronization play

different, complementary, roles in thistask. Finally, I will present preliminaryevidence from auditory attentionorienting that theta synchronizationmaintains orienting networkswhereas gamma synchronizationindexes communication within them,based on within- and across-frequency coupling analyses.

3. Neural synchronization andconsciousness

Consciousness has been proposedto emerge from functionallyintegrated large-scale ensemblesof gamma-synchronous neuralpopulations that form anddissolve at a frequency in thetheta band. I will discuss theproposal that discrete moments ofperceptual experience areimplemented by transient gamma-band synchronization of relevantcortical regions, and thatdisintegration and reintegrationof these assemblies is time-lockedto ongoing theta oscillations. Insupport of this hypothesis I willprovide evidence that (1)perceptual switching duringbinocular rivalry is time-locked togamma-band synchronizationsthat recur at a theta rate,indicating that the onset of newconscious percepts coincides withthe emergence of a new gamma-synchronous assembly that islocked to an ongoing thetarhythm; (2) localization of thegenerators of these gammarhythms reveals recurrent prefrontaland parietal sources; (3) thetamodulation of gamma bandsynchronization is observed

Lawrence WARDProfessor at British Columbia University (Vancouver, Canada) invited by the Assembly of the Professorson the proposition of Profs Alain Berthoz and Stanislas Dehaene.He gave in May 2010 four lectures entitled:Cognition, attention, and consciousness: Synchrony in mind.


between and within the activatedbrain regions. These resultssuggest that ongoing theta-modulated-gamma synchronizationmechanisms periodically reintegratea large-scale prefrontal parietalnetwork critical for perceptualexperience. Moreover, activationand network inclusion of inferiortemporal cortex and motor cortexuniquely occurs on the cycleimmediately preceding a responsesignaling perceptual switching.This suggests that the essentialprefrontal-parietal oscillatorynetwork is expanded to includeadditional cortical regionsrelevant to tasks and perceptionsfurnishing consciousness at thatmoment, in this case imageprocessing and response initiation.

4. The role of the thalamus inhuman consciousness

Currently human consciousness isconsidered to arise from activityin the neocortex or in thalamo-cortical loops. A compelling casecan be made, however, that somesubcortical areas, in particularthe diencephalon, are alsocritical. I will describe a theory inwhich phenomenal consciousnessdepends on synchronous neuralactivity in the dorsal thalamus, amajor component of thediencephalon. The theory of thethalamic dynamic core dependson four empirical pillars:anatomy and physiology of thebrain, particularly of the dorsalthalamus and associated corticalareas; brain lesion and anestheticstudies; studies of neuralsynchronization, particularly inbinocular rivalry; and resultsfrom the experimental psychologyof cognition, in particular that weexperience results of corticalcomputations and not theprocesses that produce them. Thefour empirical pillars support theidea that the neocortex computespotential contents of consciousness,and competitive laterally-inhibitory

activity in the nucleus reticularisof the thalamus selects some ofthese potential contents to includein a thalamic dynamic core ofsynchronous (and thus integrated)neural activity that gives rise tophenomenal experience of thosecontents. Destruction of thethalamus thus abolishes consciousexper ience i t se l f , whereasdestruction of a particularcortical area abolishes only theexperience of contents computedby that area. The implications ofthis theory, and others thatimplicate critical roles forsubcortical areas of the brain inconsciousness, for the concept ofbrain death are significant. Inparticular, the theory agrees withpositions such as that ofShewmon that absence of cortexor cortical activity does not meanabsence of consciousness. Ifpermanent lack of consciousnessis a criterion for “death,” thenboth neocortex and diencephalonmust be shown to be non-functional for the criterion to besatisfied. �


PRIZES AND DISTINCTIONS

IAN HACKINGHOLBERG PRIZE AWARD 2009

His Royal Highness the Princess Mette-Marit presents the Holberg Prize 2009to Professor Ian Hacking (Bergen, Norvège)© Marit Hommedal/Holberg Prize.

Words of acceptanceHolberg Prize Awards Ceremony,25th November 2009Ian Hacking

Your Royal Highness, Officers of theLudwig Holberg Memorial Fund, andGuests:

It has been the custom in past yearsfor the winner of the Holberg Prize toexpress, in a few words, thanks andrespectful comments on the Prize, theorganizers, and Baron Holberg. Thisyear I have been asked for a slightlylonger talk on some theme of currentwork and/or scientific research.

But I cannot omit the thanks. I wouldlike to speak for the entire triad of

prizes. The most important is themost junior: the research competitionfor senior students in secondaryschools. Those who have competed,and the three who have won, are thefuture. It was a brilliant idea toinclude young people in the structureof the Holberg Prize. Next mostimportant is the Nils Klim prize foryoung Nordic researchers. These arethe nearer future. Such a prize canmake a real contribution to thewinner, both financially and in termsof international recognition. The leastimportant is the senior award, for nomatter how active we old men andwomen continue to be, we have donemost of our life’s work.

I am of course grateful for thelargesse, but sad too. I got a serious15 minutes of fame which I would nothave had without a large cash award.I best liked the headline in theconservative London newspaper, TheDaily Telegraph, “CanadianPhilosopher wins 500,000 Euros andBuys New Sheets.” It is a shame thatthere cannot be extended publicrecognition for a humanist unlessthere is a lot of money involved.Money is not to be despised, however.Like many other winners of largeprizes, my wife and I will give quite alot of it away. We were struck that ourown choice of beneficiaries, asidefrom contributions to educationalinstitutions, is remarkably similar tothose listed for the Crown Prince andCrown Princess’s HumanitarianFund.

Now for a theme of current research.The best three-sentence summary ofmy life, intellectual and other, is ‘I amcurious’, not meaning, but notaltogether excluding, the sense of thefamous 1967/8 Swedish soft pornfilms I am Curious (Yellow) and I amCurious (Blue). My curiosity gets meinto a lot of trouble, not the least ofwhich is that I follow up moredifferent types of topic than I havetime and energy to devote to them.

The Holberg Symposium yesterdaywas about social questions, and inparticular, my ideas about making uppeople and the ‘looping effects’ ofclassification. But the issue I find mostpressing right now is curiosity aboutcuriosity itself.

There is a wonderful children’s story,called ME!, by the American Marxistnovelist, William Saroyan. In thebeginning, there was only one word,‘me’, and people went around saying‘me me me’ and nothing else. But thenthey discovered ‘you’. If there couldbe two, there could be more, ‘yes’ and‘no, ‘green’ and ‘blue’. And then,Saroyan tells us, people startedfinding out. On the last page of thisbeautiful book: ‘They are still findingout.’ Yes we are.

The fable teaches this: We had to findout how to find out. That is a seriesof cultural discoveries in historicaltime. But it is not only the history ofcivilizations. People had to havevarious sorts of latent abilities that

Ian Hacking, holder of the chair ofPhilosophy and History of ScientificConcepts at the Collège de France(2000–2006), was awarded the LudwigHolberg Memorial Prize in Bergen,Norway, on 25 November. There arethree parts to the Holberg prizes. TheHolberg Prize School Project is aresearch competition for pupils in uppersecondary schools. The Nils Klim Prizeis awarded to young Nordic researchersunder 35 years within the academicfields of the Holberg Prize. The HolbergInternational Memorial Prize is awardedannually for outstanding scholarly workin the fields of the arts and humanities,social sciences, law and theology. Theprize amount is NOK 4.5 million.


they learned how to use. Finding outhow to find out is an intricateinterplay between innate faculties andhuman history. It has had moreimpact on our planet than anythingelse we have done.

We have found out how to doinnumerable things, how to sculpt thehuman body in marble, how to paintit in oils, and we are finding out howto modify its genome. We not onlyfind out how to do, but also what istrue. We have found out endless factsin love and, alas, in war, but it isfinding out in the sciences that hasmade our species dominant. Perhapstoo dominant. A philosophicalanthropology of the sciences is aninquiry into those aspects of humannature that have changed the face ofthe earth and all that dwells thereon.

All finding out is particular, but thereare a few broad lines to draw. I callthem styles of scientific thinking. Iadapted the label from an Australianhistorian of the sciences, the lateAlistair Crombie. I turn his historicalanthropology of scientific reason intoa philosophical anthropology

Crombie distinguished some sixfundamentally different methods ofargument that have evolved in whathe called ‘The European Tradition’,but which have become part of thehuman heritage, and whose epicentertoday might well be the brand newmetropolis of Shenzen in the south ofChina, adjacent to Hong Kong. Or isit Bangalore in India? But theoriginating cultural history of whatwe call the sciences evolved in theMediterranean and then in Europe.

The first style to flourish, as Kant wellsaw, was mathematics. He had amagical passage in the second editionof his Critique of Pure Reason, wherehe speaks of a revolution: ‘A new lightflashed upon the mind of the first man(be he Thales or some other) whodemonstrated the properties of theisosceles triangle.’ Of course it is not asingle man but a tiny community, and

we would now say Eudoxus ratherthan Thales, but in the course ofabout eighty years a small group ofeccentrics discovered mathematicaldemonstration, an entirely new wayto find out. And we have gone onfinding out: Proof ideas andtechniques of proof continue to be anevolving part of social history.

Crombie’s next two styles of scientificthinking are, using his labels, (1)hypothetical modelling of the world,an ancient technique that crystallizedwith Galileo, and (2) experimentalexploration, even more antique anduniversal. The really decisiveconceptual step, which enabled theso-called scientific revolution to takeoff in 17th century Europe, was themerging of both into the laboratorystyle. Once again, Kant spoke of ‘thesudden outcome of an intellectualrevolution’. He singled out Galileo onthe one hand and Torricelli on theother. Theory and exploration had tocombine in order to change the world.I use Robert Boyle and his Air Pumpas an emblem of a new crystallizationinto the laboratory style. At its core isthe building of apparatus not only toprobe the world but also to createnew phenomena. Crombie has threemore styles, of which I shall mentiononly the fourth, the taxonomic style,found in all cultures, but crystallizingin the work of Linnaeus.

It is the philosophical twists thatintrigue me. I start with an eruditeversion of popular history of thesciences, but canonical historicalevents get new meanings. There mustalso be a cognitive side to the story,although at the moment it is more apriori than empirical. One school ofcognitive science uses a modularapproach. It holds, for example, thatthere is a universal structure to theways in which human beings theworld over classify living things. Thetaxonomic style of thinking builds onthat. In truth I am not much of amodularist, but one can see each styleof thinking as deploying a specificgroup of human abilities that have to

be uncovered and cultivated. When ‘anew light flashed’ on Thales,Eudoxus, and their colleagues,something in the human mind clicked,the realization of a potential alreadythere. Within a very few years therewas a prodigious upwelling ofgeometrical creativity. The Israelihistorian of mathematics, RevielNetz, has made a marvellous start onthat ‘cognitive history’, as he calls it.But let us not overemphasizecognition. The laboratory styledemands not only cognitive skills ofmodelling and exploration, but alsofinding out how to do things with thehuman body, hands and eye. It is anembodied art.

A more purely philosophical twist hasto do with truth itself. The styles ofthinking are not ways of finding outtruths that are just there, waiting to bediscovered. The styles are self-authenticating, in that they generatenew criteria for what is true. This isnot some kind of relativism; it is anexplanation of where our sense ofobjectivity comes from. It may soundlike wild historicism, but it is close tothe verification principle of the ViennaCircle positivists.

I shall stop there, at a tantalizingbeginning. We are now in theheartland of philosophy. We are inKant-land, yes, but I see it as the homeof the philosopher of the modernepoch who had the greatest curiosity,namely Leibniz. He is my role model,curious about everything, includingcuriosity itself. I am encouraged bythe Holberg prize to carry on withthese reflections on scientific reason,and perhaps to bring them to fruitionin the nearish future. So once again, Iexpress my thanks. �

Ian Hacking’s last cours, in 2005,about scientific reason (2006) isavailable online at www.college-de-france.fr


SERGE HAROCHECNRS GOLD METAL 2009

Serge Haroche is a specialist in atomicphysics and quantum optics. In the1970s–80s, after completing his PhD ondressed atoms under the supervision ofClaude Cohen-Tannoudji (1967–71), hedeveloped new laser spectroscopymethods based on his research on

quantum beatsand super-radiance. Hisinterest thenturned toRydberg atoms,giant atomicstates sensitiveto microwavesand thereforesuited tofundamentalresearch onmatter-radiationinteraction. Heshowed thatthese atoms,coupled withsuper-conductingcavities con-taining a fewphotons, wereideal systemsfor testing basic

quantum laws and for demonstratingquantum logic operations that heldpromise for quantum informationprocessing.

Serge Haroche started to do research in1965, when atomic physics andquantum optics were undergoingprofound change following thediscovery of lasers and the developmentof new methods of manipulating atomsby means of light. He is a pioneer in thefield of quantum optics, observingatom-light interaction at the most basiclevel. His research enabled him toisolate an atom in a cavity with almostideally reflective walls, and to force itto interact with an elementary fieldconsisting of a few photons at the most.

Serge Haroche’s work made it possibleto study and demonstrateexperimentally a number of postulatesin quantum mechanics that defyintuition. His results contributed toexplaining the difference in behaviourbetween the quantum world and theclassical macroscopic world. Hisexperiments also made it possible tostudy the history of a single photon inan electromagnetic cavity by ‘seeing’ itseveral hundred times, and have shownits sudden and unpredictabledisappearance in what is called aquantum jump. For the first time it wasshown that it is not necessary to destroya single photon in order to observe it.

Serge Haroche and his team illustratedthe ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ paradox, whichrefers to a thought experiment in whicha macroscopic system placed in contactwith a single atom is put in asuperposition of two classicallydifferent states. In the experimentcarried out by the ENS team, an atomprepared in two superposed energystates is coupled in a cavity to amicrowave field containing severalphotons. Under the effect of thiscoupling, the field is put into a state ofquantum superposition, acquiring two

phases at the same time. Theresearchers have monitored thetemporal evolution of this field andhave been able to observe thedisappearance of the quantumsuperposition state, which rapidlyturned into a state described by thelaws of classical physics. Byexperimentally studying thisphenomenon called ‘decoherence’, theyhave furthered understanding of whymacroscopic systems can generally beunderstood with classical concepts,even though they are made up ofparticles which, on microscopic scales,obey the counter-intuitive laws ofquantum theory.

Apart from these fundamentalimplications, these manipulations ofphotons and atoms are used to createprototypes which demonstrate generalmethods of information storage andquantum calculation. Whereas innormal computers and communicationcircuits, information is coded inelectrical or light signals in the form ofclassical ‘bits’ with two mutually-exclusive values, 0 and 1, quantuminformation proposes the use of‘quantum bits’ or ‘qubits’ carried byquantum systems that can exist in asuperposition of 0 and 1 states. Theprinciple of superposition thusconsiderably enhances the possibilitiesof calculation and communication.Theoreticians have shown thatmachines making use of such qubitswould be able to perform certaincalculations far more swiftly thancurrent computers. They would alsomake it impossible to violate theprivacy of information transfers, incontrast with current methods basedon classical cryptographic protocols,which have not proved to be absolutelysecure. Serge Haroche’s cavity quantumelectrodynamics experiments aremaking a major contribution to thedevelopment of this new physics. �

(source: CNRS)

Serge Haroche, holder of the chair ofQuantum Physics at the Collège deFrance since 2001, received theCNRS Gold Medal in 2009.This distinction is awarded to ascientific personality whose work hasprovided an exceptional contributionto the vitality and influence of Frenchresearch.

Serge Haroche, Loïc de LaMornay (journalist) and ArnoldMigus (Director of the CNRS) atthe ceremony for the presentationof the Gold Medal at theSorbonne, 16 December 2009.


DARWIN’S BICENTENARY

COLLÈGE DE FRANCE AUTUMN SYMPOSIUM

15 AND 16 OCTOBER 2009

Variations on a human themeAlain Prochiantz

2009 can unquestionably be calledDarwin Year since we celebrated boththe 200th anniversary of the naturalist’sbirth and the 150th anniversary of thepublication of On the Origin ofSpecies. To some extent, this hascontributed to eclipsing another greatevolutionist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,who published La Philosophiezoologique in the year of Darwin’sbirth. Larmarck ended his life blind; hisdaughter would lead him to theamphitheatre where he gave lectures toa few loyal followers, including EtienneGeoffroy Saint-Hilaire. He was calledLamarck the Red by Napoleon and bythe English Tories who had littleinterest in importing the FrenchRevolution and the latest decapitationtechnologies. We wish to take thisopportunity to salute a scholar who isnever far away when we talk aboutevolution and whose work is graduallybeing rediscovered through the newimportance granted to epigenesis.

In spite of its sometimes pompous—orjingoistic—aspects, which may bring asmile to some faces, the celebration ofgreat men reminds us above all that homosapiens is attached to his history. If I’m notmistaken—and the ethologists willcorrect me here if I am—other animals donot have this type of cultural practice; noteven chimpanzees, who are our closestcousins, or so the ethologists say. Had Ichosen to present a paper at the openingsymposium, it would probably have beento deflate the myth of a 1.23% differencebetween the genomes of homo sapiensand those of pan troglodytes (orpaniscus), and to point out that while thechimpanzee is indeed the human being’sclosest cousin, saying that humans are98.77% chimpanzee (or 80% mouse) ismeaningless.

This unique nature of sapiens, thisattachment to a history or histories, tocultures, is particularly relevant whenwe talk of Darwin. He constantlyhumiliated sapiens by reminding himof his humble origins, and questionedthe strangeness of a species whichmight have inherited mental faculties—and therefore also psychological andmoral ones—from its evolving history,but which had pushed them to such anextreme that it could be referred to as atragic animal. It was biologicalhominization, an evolving process, thatled to the cultural possibilities ofhumanization.

The symposium left little room for‘pure’ biology. After so manygatherings of various kinds devoted tothe event, it seemed there was nothingleft to add. Yet, despite its limitations,that small space did make it possible togive an idea of the current state of atheory which is itself evolving. The leastone can expect from a living theory isthat it evolves; even if that indicates adegree of imperfection, or ratherincompleteness, which serves as anangle of attack for the creationists who,on the contrary, have a perfect theory—or so they think. Dogmas don’t evolve;they are dead and—often—deadly.Moreover, the creationists have reasonto hate Darwin, an atheist scholar forwhom evolution had neither an endnor a goal, and for whom the greatbook of nature was not written by adivine being in mathematical terms.The history of this departure from aGalilean conception of nature remainsto be written; just as its effects on thevery nature of science is still to beanalysed. But that is another issue;perhaps the topic of a futuresymposium.

Stimulated by the diversity of the fieldsof knowledge present at the Collège de

France, we have given pride of place tothe question of man—or rather, ofhumans, Françoise Héritier would say,correcting me. In this respect we havefollowed Darwin, whose The Descentof Man is a long series of thoughts notonly on the evolution of humans butalso on humans as social animals. Thisreflection encompasses hominization,our evolving history, and humanizationas a construction of societies and of theevidently contingent rules that governour ways of living together. It ismoreover interesting to note thatDarwinism itself was influenced by thesocial question—Malthus—andinfluenced it—social Darwinism.Humanization is also the invention ofcultures that enable us to recounthistories and to endeavour to givemeaning to, or find meaning in, thefleeting moment that any organic life is.

And even if our mortal destiny isensured (dare I say) at an individuallevel, and perhaps even at the level ofthe species or of all life on earth, therewas a firm intention in the openingsymposium not to overlook the futureevolution of human beings. Some talkof post-human; I prefer simply talkingof a technical evolution, because even ifsapiens are still evolving biologically,they are animals whose destiny isabove all technical—tools being theextension not only of their arms butalso, above all, of their brains. Without

Professor Alain Prochiantz


The acts of this colloquium are published under the title Darwin: 200 ans, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2010.Below is a summary of Professor Delmas-Marty’s conference (published in the newspaper Liberation,19 November, 2009), followed by a summary of Professor Jean-Pierre Changeux’s conference.

Hominization and HumanizationMireille Delmas-Marty

While biological evolution is the result oftransformations creating a single humanspecies (hominization), social andcultural evolution, which occurred later,is the result of cultural diversification andthe emergence of a normativity proper toeach human group (humanization). Thetension between these two process,which are studied separately, is notobvious because they share neither thesame timescale (millions of years for theformer and thousands of years for thelatter) nor the same values (survival of thespecies/promotion of each human being’sdignity).

But Darwin himself noted that thesocial and moral faculties limited theeffect of natural selection on humanbeings. And we are entering a phase inwhich scientific knowledge enables usto change reproductive methods and/orthe characteristics of the humanspecies—even to manufacture hybrids,whether human/animal orhuman/machine. By diversifying thehuman species, humanization maytherefore end up modifying the courseof hominization. Paradoxically, theprocess of universalizing ethical normsmade it clear that a convention wasnecessary to recall that cultural diversity

is part of the common heritage ofhumanity (UNESCO, 2005), as ifhumanization tended to eliminatedifferences and unify cultures.

It is therefore necessary to link the twoprocesses. Jean-Pierre Changeuxexplained that epigenetic variability(which is particularly strong inhumans) fosters creativity, and thushumanization; and Stanislas Dehaeneshowed how “neuronal recycling,”which prolongs hominization,contributes to culture and thus tohumanization. Law contributes tomaking this link in several ways.

Law Reveals TensionsThe right to life clearly benefits thespecies, and thus hominization: theprohibition on killing seems quasi-universal (as are its exceptions, such aswar or self-defense). There isdisagreement as to the death penalty,however, and more broadly on life’sbeginning and end (abortion andeuthanasia). Hannah Arendtemphasized that birth and death “arenot natural occurrences, properlyspeaking”: human life seems limited bya beginning and an end, while nature,non-human life, follows a cyclicalmovement with no birth or death asthese words are generally understood.If the forms of the right to life have

varied with the history of peoples, it’sbecause they are part of humanization.

Unlike the right to life, the right to equaldignity, which underlies the prohibitionsof slavery and of torture and inhumanor degrading treatment, is clearly tied tothe process of humanization. But it alsoreveals tensions, for example when onejustifies torture by the need to save lives.And when the Penal Code qualifiesreproductive human cloning as a crimeagainst “the human species,” ratherthan “humanity,” it separateshominization from humanization, andthus risks increasing tensions.

Disruptive LawLaw is especially disruptive when it isdirectly related to the dehumanization

tools, which may also be our futuredownfall, our few thousand Africanancestors would not have close toseven billion descendents now,occupying virtually the entire surfaceof the earth, not to mention the moon.In this respect, the post-human seemsessentially human.

Indeed, tools are the extension of ourbrains, exceptional human brains thathave reached a point of organicdevelopment bearing no comparisonwith that of our chimpanzee relatives.By opening the field of humancultures—of which techniques are

part—this cerebral hominizationprojected homo sapiens outside ofnature (I daren’t mention a clearing).The Darwin Bicentenary symposiumwas therefore an opportunity toexplore this highly topical subject ofthe future of humans, that is, the futureof human cultures in all theirdimensions, through all the fields ofknowledge, both present and yet to beinvented.

By looking back at those two days oftalks, it seems obvious that thespeakers played the game, that welearned a great deal, and that

questions were raised which enabledus to further reflect on the subject.This letter to commemorate thecommemoration is above all a note ofgratitude extended to all those who,during those two days, shared theirknowledge with us and enabled us tolearn and to discuss their subjects. Ialso wish to thank the attentive andcultured audiences. Everyone is nowlooking forward to reading thevarious contributions which will bepublished in a collective volume. Suchis our custom. �

Professor Mireille Delmas-Marty


Introductory talkJean-Pierre Changeux

Darwin was born 200 years ago buthis ideas are as alive and ubiquitousas ever; to the extent that they havebecome part and parcel of ourdefinition of life.

In his seminal book, On the Origin ofSpecies, Darwin proposed a theory ofevolution which he applied tohominization, that is, the origin of theHomo sapiens species. Then, in TheDescent of Man, he extended hisreflection to humanization, that is, theorigins of humanity, focusing on“man’s mental faculties” andcomparing them to those of “inferioranimals”, to the community of certaininstincts, and so on. Merely listing thetopics covered in the book shows theextent of Darwin’s thinking on thehuman brain and its capacities.

I will therefore limit my introductorycomments to the human brain and toa fundamental concept of Darwin’sthinking: the notion of variation. Theword is everywhere in The Origin ofSpecies. Darwin wrote that “specieshad not been independently created,but had descended, like varieties, fromother species”. He devoted the firstchapter of his book to the study of

“variation under domestication andunder nature”. While Darwin sawnatural selection as an essentialmechanism leading to the divergenceof characteristics, variation is anequally important aspect of his theory.In my opinion variation is the drivingforce of evolution.

Variability comes in at least threeforms. The first is genetic variability.In recent decades our knowledge onthe genome of living beings hasincreased considerably. We now havea detailed picture of the tree of life,magnificently illustrating Darwin’sthinking, with the profusion anddiversification of genomes. To the tree-shaped and hierarchical view of theevolution of genomes, contemporaryscience adds horizontal gene transfers.The representation of the evolution ofthe species in the living world has thuschanged from Darwin’s original treeto a complex network of geneticinteractions.

of a human being, as when it legitimatesslavery or bases certain forms ofcriminality on the continuity betweenanimals and humans: Lombroso citedDarwin to support his argument thatcertain criminals were incompletehuman beings. And the eugenicsmovement legitimated not only thesterilization of criminals in both Europeand the United States, but also the Nazipolicies of castration and extermination.The 21st century is not devoid ofmonsters either: from terrorists labeled“unlawful combatants” to sexualperverts and other perpetrators ofserious crimes, the concern is no longerto simply punish the guilty, but toeliminate dangerous “monsters,” whoare thus dehumanized.

But disruption might also be caused bylikening all or part of the non-humanworld to humans. Under the combinedinfluence of scientific discoveries(namely the small genetic differencebetween man and chimpanzees) andtechnological innovations, ecologicalmovements have become moreradicalized, as illustrated by the1978

declaration on animal rights qualifyingany act “compromising the survival ofa wild species and any decision leadingto such an act” as “genocide.” Suchexcesses show that to regulate, lawmust transform tensions intointeractions.

Law as RegulatorFor law to act as a regulator, eachpair’s relationship must be rebuilt.The “human/inhuman” relationshipis central to human rights’ texts andbiomedicine, which requires respectfor both the human being as amember of the human species, andthe right to equal dignity. This shouldlead to unifying crimes againsthumanity and crimes against thehuman species. Indeed, if, “as part ofa widespread or systematic attackdirected against any civilianpopulation, with knowledge of theattack” (International Criminal CourtStatute, art. 7), “dehominization”produced new groups throughbiological changes (such as eugenics,cloning, or crossing species) on atimescale completely different from

that of human evolution, it wouldincrease the danger of discriminatorytreatment, and therefore ofdehumanization. Such practiceswould also undermine the principle ofindeterminateness characteristic ofboth our biological species and ourethic of responsibility.

Rebuilding the “human/non-human” relationship without anyanthromoporphism requires aconcept such as that of “duty” (asenshrined in the 2005 Frenchconstitutional charter on theenvironment), which institutes anon-reciprocal relationship withnature or animals, as well as withfuture generations. In this way,ethical evolution would attain acertain degree of universalization.Law would then have to reconcilesuch universalization with thecultural diversity that enabled ourslow humanization, as incompleteas it may be. �

Professor Jean-Pierre Changeux


Will this progress in the knowledge ongenomes enable us to lift the veilshrouding ‘human nature’? We doindeed know what all the moleculescomposing the human body andespecially the brain are, but is thatenough? At this stage we are still far offthe mark. The human genome andthose of other related mammals havebeen sequenced in their entirety, butwhereas we know the number andidentity of all the genes, the relationshipbetween genomes and cerebralphenotypes remains an enigma. Fromthe fly to the mouse, the number ofgenes increases with the number ofneurons; yet we find the same numberof genes in mice as in humans, and thesequencing of these genes is very similar.What is the genetic origin of thedifferences, especially in the size andcomplexity of the brain, which appearedduring the evolution of mammals, fromthe mouse to the human being? Thisparadox, that molecular biologists stillhave to solve, is particularly difficult tounderstand, for the evolution is still veryrecent: only a few million years separateus from the ancestors that we share withchimpanzees. Shifting from a linearstructure, that of genomes, to a three-dimensional structure, like that of thebrain, involves a series of intermediatesteps. That is where evolution can begrasped, for the jump in complexity isprobably linked to the non-linearity ofthe processes involved. Geneticmodifications are likely to haveinteracted with one another and createda combinatory network, with a resulting‘connectivity’ at the level of the genome.Thus, small genetic variations can entailsubstantial morphological ones. That iswhy seemingly insignificant variationssuch as genetic duplications can explainthe non-linear character of the shift

between genomic connectivity andcerebral connectivity.

Variability is at work not only in geneticevolution but also during development.The mass of the adult brain is roughlyfive times larger than that of a neonate,and connectional developmentcontinues throughout the first fifteenyears of life. This epigenetic dimensionis decisive in explaining the connectionalvariability resulting from this longperiod of development in conditions ofprofound interaction with theenvironment. It leads to a new paradoxfor the neurobiologist: how to reconcilethis connectional variability with theconstancy of the function?

Once again, we see the importance ofthe application of Darwinian thinking,for instance in understanding certainbrain pathologies. Several recent theoriesestablish a link between serious neuro-psychiatric diseases and epigeneticdevelopmental abnormalities. A recentexplanation for schizophrenia posits adisturbance in the epigenetic selection ofsynapses during development.

In this respect Darwinian thinkingenables us to further our understandingof humanization. In humans, the phaseof connectional evolution is a period ofextended development and constantlearning where the child is in closeinteraction with his or her physical,social and cultural environment. This isprobably decisive in the prodigiousdevelopment of culture in the humanspecies and in the shift fromhominization to humanization.Epigenetic variability and themultiplicity of sensitive periodscontributed to creating stable imprintsof cultural evolution in the developing

brain, much like the acquisition ofwriting, for example.

Finally, the last level of variability that Iwish to mention is that of the brain’sspontaneous activity, starting with theembryonic period and contributingeventually to the development of thebrain itself. It is the source of thediversity of our actions on the world, ofour creativity. This time, the variabilityof individuals’ behaviours and of theirrelations with others takes on a socialdimension.

Thus, to the genetic variability takingplace at the level of the evolution of thespecies, is added, at the ontogenetic level,connectional and epigenetic variabilityand then, at yet another level, thevariability of the brain’s spontaneousactivity which participates in thedynamics of thinking and continues insocial and cultural interactions. At thislevel we find the establishment of extra-cerebral memories using writing, worksof art and, more recently, electroniccomputers which have paved the way toimmense possibilities for processinginformation.

This stroll through the evolving historyof the human brain and its multiple levelsis an invitation to give up the ‘instructive’model of the brain - proceeding by input-output—for a generalized Darwinianschema—by variation and selection. Wetherefore opt for a projective style ofcerebral functioning. This modelaccounts better for the Darwinianevolutions embedded in our brain, whichare on-going and contribute to theexceptional dynamic of humanization,with an evolving opening onto thefuture, and no apparent limits! �


Jean Dausset left us in June 2009.Holder of the chair of ExperimentalMedicine at the Collège de Francefrom 1977 to 1987, he was not onlya great researcher but also anoutstanding teacher. To provide uswith a glimpse of the man and hiswork, I have drawn on textsproduced at the Collège de France,which have not all been published:the presentation of the chair byFrançois Jacob; Jean Dausset’sinaugural lecture at the Collège deFrance; and his closing lecture in1987.

Jean Dausset was the author of oneof the most important discoveries inimmunology—the HLA system.Everything started with a finding in1952, as he observed theagglutination of white globules in thepresence of a polytransfused donor’sserum, he had the idea that it couldbe caused by antibodies in the serum.In 1958 he demonstrated theexistence of a leukocyte group, likethe blood groups carried by redglobules. He posited that there weregroups of tissue that in a sensemarked an individual’s biologicalidentity. Thus, between 1952 and1958 the HLA system was born.

In 1976 François Jacob nominatedJean Dausset to the chair ofExperimental Medicine at theAssembly of Professors, pointing outthat ‘all of his observations open animmense domain for immunology andpathology. Far beyond the leukocytegroups originally studied, the HLAsystem of histocompatibility is afunctional unit of prime importance. Itis the real command centre of thebody’s defence system both againstattacks from the outside and tomaintain the body’s integrity.’ He

emphasized the marker’s precision andthe extraordinary diversity that itallowed for: ‘apart from identical twins,no two individuals can be the same’.Today, advances in epigenetics areshowing that even in the case ofidentical twins, there are differences.

In the inaugural lecture of his chair,Jean Dausset pointed out that thestudy of the HLA complex had notyet yielded all its secrets. He hoped‘that the increasingly preciseknowledge of the inner workings ofthe immune response will make itpossible to control that response atwill, including both its positive side,immunization, and its negative side,tolerance’.

One of his experiments with skin graftson healthy volunteers to demonstratehumans’ histocompatibility was asuperb case of clinical investigation ofextreme simplicity, elegance andfecundity. It was a starting point thatmade it possible to envisage the use ofphenotyping and then of the HLAgenotyping to guarantee successfulgrafts. Jean Dausset subsequentlyplayed an essential part in FranceTransplant and the search forcompatible donors for grafts. Theapplications were numerous. One ofthose that he strongly promoted wasthe use of the HLA genotype tomonitor populations, their migration,their isolation, their merging, and soon. The seeds of all these developmentswere in his inaugural lecture in 1977.

Jean Dausset was a builder. In 1984he created the Centre d’Etude duPolymorphisme Humain (now theJean Dausset Foundation). He hadthe intuition of the importance ofthis polymorphism to characterizeindividuals’ uniqueness and thus topromote predictive medicine. Thisled to the creation of the humangenetic map. In this respect his workwas both crucial and fruitful: from2,000 human polymorphisms

known in 1992, countless thousandsmore have now been identified.

From 1955 to 1958 Jean Daussetconducted the reform of the CHU(university hospitals), loyal to theideas of Claude Bernard who in 1865had written: ‘medicine does not endin hospitals, as is often believed, butmerely begins there.’ In fact, Bernardexplained, ‘In leaving the hospital, aphysician, jealous of the title in itsscientific sense, must go into hislaboratory; and there, by experimentson animals, he will seek to account forwhat he has observed in his patients’.This was an inspiration for the reformachieved by Jean Dausset, which wasseen as a model of well-designed andimplemented cooperation betweengovernment administration, scientists,doctors and politicians.

In 1976 François Jacob hademphasized the qualities of thisprolific researcher gifted withimmense curiosity for the mostdiverse aspects of research. He notedthat he was ‘one of the rare mencapable of putting formidableproblems of medicine in biologicalterms’. Indeed, as early as 1975, inhis brochure at the Collège deFrance, Jean Dausset had pointedout possible associations betweenHLA antigens and pathologies.Today the number of applications of

Symposium organized by the chairof Experimental MedicineProfessor Pierre Corvol8–9 January 2010

Professor Pierre Corvol

THE DAYS OF JEAN DAUSSET


Minutes of the morning sessionon cellular immunologyHLA, self and non-self: a systemicperspectivePhilippe Kourilsky

The discovery of the HLA system—and of H-2, its equivalent inmice—has had immense repercussionsfor immunology. Several werementioned during a first session oncellular immunology, chaired by M.Sasportes (Paris). The genesresponsible for coding the mainhistocompatibility antigens are highlypolymorphic. We now haveknowledge of several thousand allelesof genes responsible for coding“classical” class I and II antigens. Sinceeach human being possesses threegenes of each class, usually different inthe two chromosomes, the millions ofcombinations obtained by assortingthem provide what could effectively beseen as a personal identity card foreach individual. This extremepolymorphism, now studied in detailwith regard to gene sequences, is ofprime importance for organ and bonemarrow transplants. The presentations

were concerned with the underlyingimmunological reasons.

One relates to the primary function ofhistocompatibility antigens, whichconsists in presenting T cells withfragments of protein (peptides)stemming from both outside andinside the cell. The polymorphismsaffecting these molecules have a deepimpact on the range of peptides theypresent, and distinguish eachindividual’s immune system from allothers. Using state of the arttechnology, M. Bonneville (Nantes)was able to study, with unmatchedprecision, the impact of the HLAphenotype on the range of T cells atthe level of several individual peptidesand of the few T cells that recognizethem.

In the case of transplants, the complexand powerful reactions that occurwhen the graft carries an HLA that isdifferent from that of the receivermost often lead to a rejection of thegraft, or else cause the graft to attackthe host.

It is now understood that thesereactions involve not only T cells butalso NK cells (natural killers).A. Bensoussan (Créteil) shed light onthis important development bycarrying out an in-depth analysis ofone of their receptors, CD160.

The HLA gene family includes notonly genes responsible for coding themain histocompatibility antigens, but

also many other genes, which areoften far less polymorphic. One ofthem in particular, HLA-G, is studiedbecause, as E. Carosella (CEA Paris)has shown, it encody severalmolecules with suppressive properties.These genes play a key part in a widerange of important situations such aspregnancy, successful transplants, andthe immunological rejection oftumours.

The immune system of someindividuals carrying mutations can befaulty, especially if these mutationsaffect the expression of certainhistocompatibility antigens. Thecorrection of these often fataldeficiencies is theoretically possiblethrough gene therapy. A. Fisher(Necker, Paris) has shown that thisapproach can yield outstandingresults, and that it now seems possibleto control the negative side effectswhich had caused its clinical trials tobe temporarily put on hold.

The role of the HLA is so central tothe immune system that it is useful toseek to grasp it from a systemicperspective. In view of this, P.Kourilsky (Collège de France) haspointed to the issues intrinsic tocomplex systems. He has insisted onconcepts such as robustness andquality control, which have seldombeen used in immunology until now.These could have a role to play inmany pathologies, especially thoselinked to auto-immune disorders. �

this principle is huge. In his inaugurallecture he indicated that, for the firsttime, medicine could be orientedfrom birth according to individuals’genetic predispositions. This openedup the perspective of personalizedpreventive medicine that would bemore effective and less expensive. Hesaid that he expected to see an attackon, and even a reduction of, ‘one ofthe soundest and least shakeablebastions of injustice among men: thatof innate inequality in the face ofdisease’.

Another sign of Jean Dausset’senlightened humanism, in his closinglecture in 1997, was his warningagainst the risks that ‘knowledgeabout the workings of these genesthat make people more susceptible todiseases’ could entail. He foresawtwo stumbling blocks: violation ofindividual and family privacy; andopening the door to random andabusive selection of genes, leading toa ‘semblance of eugenics’. Anoptimist in spite of all, he called forapproaches in which both science

and ethics were present, andexpressed his hopes regarding geneticengineering: ‘any new knowledge isa liberation, any ignorance is alimitation, for one should notconfuse knowledge, which is peculiarto and the pride of humankind, withits beneficial or dangerous use’. �

Professor Pierre Corvol


Homage to Jean DaussetLaurent DegosHead of the Haute Autorité de SantéIn1952, while looking foran explanationfor the lack of white blood cells in certainpatients, Jean Dausset had the idea ofmixing their white blood cells with serumfrom a person who had received bloodtransfusions. To his great surprise he saw,with his naked eye,agglutinated cells on theglass slide. This was the initial experimentthat was to lead to the Nobel Prize.

Jean Dausset was always drawn to medicalresearch. Intuitive and perceptive, onoccasion it was difficult for him to get hisviews across but time proved him right. Hewas opinionated and afraid of no-one.There was no administrative or financialobstacle that he could not overcome. Hewas passionate and able to communicatehis passion. He was very unaffected andinspired respect. He had an uncommonaura of nobility which was apparent onfirst meeting him. He was enthusiasticabout any original or creative idea.However, anyone speaking to him had toweigh their words and keep to the point,and not express utopian or outrageousviews. Although he did not want there tobe any barriers between himself and others,everyone would watch their words or theirattitude. He was as demanding of himselfas he was of those around him.

Before informing me in July 2007 that hewas moving permanently to the BalearicIslands, Jean Dausset handed me a redspiral-bound notebook. On the first pagehe had written the four areas in which hehad made his main discoveries:transplantation, predictive medicine,immune response and anthropology.These

words, so rich in meaning,both for knowledge and forpatient care, inspired the two-day scientific conference forwhich we are gathered here.

Jean Dausset chaired theinternational immunologyconference in 1980, receivingthe Nobel Prize the same year.Professor at the Paris-DenisDiderot university, head ofdepartment at the Hôpital

Saint-Louis, director of National Instituteof Health and Medical Research(INSERM) unit U 93, he was appointedprofessorat the Collège de France in1978,while retaining a laboratory at the HôpitalSaint Louis. Elected to the Academy ofSciences and the Academy of Medicine, in1984 he founded the HumanPolymorphism Study Centre (CEPH).That same year he was appointed presidentof the Universal Movement For ScientificResponsibility (MURS). These functionsreveal the many facets of his personality.

Jean Dausset was able to combinethe spiritof discovery and genius. Discovering thehidden secrets of nature was his passion.No serum reacted the same as any other.He adopted a researcher’s approach andavisionary’s reasoning: by giving a patient atransfusion of blood from a single donorand repeating this principle, he obtainedserums which agglutinated only 50% ofthe series of white blood cells from hisblood donors, whom he called his whitecell panel. He succeeded in determining thefirst leucocyte group called MAC—theinitials of the three donors in the panelwhose blood was not agglutinated byserums (HLA-A2 in the currentnomenclature). He liked to cut up andrearrange the columns and rows of tablesshowing the reactions between serums andwhite blood cells, hoping to find order, anorder which would be called the leucocytegroup.

This colloquium has revealed theextraordinary advance which the discoveryof molecules of the human majorhistocompatibility complex represented. In1975, in his review article, Jean Daussetwrote: “the HLA complex[…] governsthethree stages in the allogeneic response:recognition, immunisationand destruction.It is however probable that the mechanisminvolved in allograft rejectionalso acts as adefence against somatic mutations, orindeed tumoral or viral antigens”. Thisseemed very strange then. Time has sinceshown him to be right.

Jean Dausset had a passion for discoveryand creation. An expert in modernpainting, he ran a gallery in the Rue duDragon, near Saint Germain des Prés, the

artistic and literary centre where thesurrealists used to meet. His spirit ofdiscovery and creativity inspiredhis effortsto build bridges between discoveries andapplicationsfor patient care. He looked formeans of bidging the gap betweenmolecules and genes, but also betweengenes and applications beneficial topatients, such as trans-plantation ordetecting susceptibility to disease.

To demonstrate the link between leucocytegroups and transplant rejection, he calledon the assistance of volunteer donors andthe American surgeon Felix Rappaport.The Czecho slovak Pavol Yvanyi and hiswife Dagmar assisted him in the firstdescription of this complex which theycalled Hu-1. Since 1964, internationalworkshops have been held every two years,in Durham then in Leyden, Turin, LosAngeles, Evian, etc.

Jean Dausset worked with the greatdoctors of his era: Jean Hamburger onkidney transplantation, Jean Bernard onbone marrow transplants. Organ or tissuetransplantation was at the heart of scientificadvances in the XXth century, for the goodof patients. He founded France Transplantand France Transplant Greffe de moelle[bone marrow transplant]—the mainactivities of which are now undertaken bythe French Transplant Establishmentwhich became the Biomedicine Agency.

After discovering leucocyte groups, he setabout looking for links between thepresence of a group and susceptibility to adisease. HLA groups provided a basis forrecognizing susceptibility to diseases suchas diabetes, multiple sclerosis, narcolepsyor Crohn’s disease: the best known isankylosing spondylitis, for which thepresence of allele HLA B27 has become adiagnostic test. Why do these linksbetween leucocyte group andsusceptibility to disease exist? Thequestion has not been answered, but itprompted Jean Dausset to introduce theconcept of “predictive medicine” whichhas developed greatly since then. Theterms used are prediction, personalisedprevention and personalised treatment—right through to pharmacogenetics: theHaute Autorité de santé has recently been


asking that an HLA B5701 test beperformed before an anti-AIDS drug isprescribed, to avoid adverse effects.Tomorrow, prevention or personaliseddiagnosis will be on offer.

The discovery of HLA polymorphismapplied to anthropology was the reason forthe international workshop held at Evian in1972. Jean Dausset summed up its findingsin this sentence, which in 2009 wasengraved on the walls of the courtyard atthe Hôpital Saint Louis: “every person isunique”.

A discoverer and a genius, Jean Daussetwas also a man who showedcommitment, enterprise and responsibility.After the American landing in NorthAfrica, he joined the French army as avolunteer and took part in the Tunisiancampaign. Following his work intransfusions and intensive care during thewar, liberation saw him posted to theblood transfusion centre at the HôpitalSaint-Antoine. He carried outexsanguination transfusions, i.e. bloodexchanges, for women with septicaemiaafter an abortion. With his teams ofvoluntary donors, he carried out these armto armexchangesof blood (up to 15 litres)using many donors, one after the other, forthe same patient. These women, facingdeath from septicaemia and consequentrenal failure, left the hospital cured.

Jean Dausset managed to recruithundreds of volunteer donors. In 1962,he launched the Royan appeal forrailway workers, then press campaignscalling on families to get involved in hisscientific adventure. Thus, everymorning, about ten donors gave bloodfor our experiments. These were mainlyrailway workers, whose blood providedthe white blood cell panel which wasused to reveal the complex secrets ofleucocyte groups. He also called uponfamily members when performing skingrafts. At his office, his desk became anoperating table and Felix Rappaportwent back and forth between New Yorkand Paris. The loyalty of his donors—of blood, plasma and skin (“la bande àDausset”) —never waivered. Hisfriendship with them was so deep that

he even asked them to accompany himto Stockholm to collect his Nobel prize.

The reform of the university hospitals wasanother ambitious project into which JeanDausset threw himself with the help of his“young team” and with the support andunfailing friendship of Professor RobertDebré. He is also the prime mover behindthe research building which became theUniversity Institute of Haematology. Atthat time, he was a member of the privateoffice of René Billières, minister for nationaleducation and social affairs, who consultedhim after reading, in Le Figaroon8 March1957, an articleentitled“A moving appealfrom Professor Jean Bernard: cancer andleukaemia can be conquered”. Since socialconflicts led him to fear attacks in theNational Assembly the next day, theminister asked for a rapid response to thisappeal. Seizing his opportunity, JeanDausset urged Jean Bernard to ask for atleast a two-storey building. He ultimatelysent the minister a proposal for four storeys.The building got built.

In 1984 he founded the HumanPolymorphism Study Centre, withassistance from an unexpected source. Inthe post-war years, when he was runninghis art gallery in the Rue du Dragon, hegave advice on buying paintings to MmeAnavi, a collector. 35 years later, sherecognized him on television receiving theNobel prize and bequeathed him somepaintings for his research work.

Jean Dausset continued, with DanielCohen, his research into humanpolymorphism. It led to the description ofthe first maps of the human genome.Calling upon many laboratories all over theworld, he demonstrated the effectiveness oflarge-scale collaboration,while making thetools and results available to all. He was agreat entrepreneur who enjoyed thededicated support of Robert Debré, JeanBernard, Jean Hamburger and RenéBillières, and of donors and sponsors.

Discovery, application andentrepreneurship are activities forwhich there is one requirement, that ofresponsibility, in the sense ofaccountability, being answerable, but

also in the sense of response ability, theability to respond, to answer for what onedoes, particularly as a scientist, and beinganswerable to society and topolicymakers. That was one of his greatconcerns. He chaired the MURS from1984 to 2001. He opposed the sale ofhuman organs and the patenting ofhuman genes, and advocated the defenceof human rights. He also drew attentionto the scarcity of freshwater resources,organising two colloquiums with MURSin 1987 and 1996. He chaired theAcademy of Water from 1995.

Dedicated, entrepreneurial and responsible:that is how we his collaboratorsknew him.His door was always open and we wouldcome and show him our latest results, talkto him about our ideas or the projects wewere planning. He would encourage us,and criticism was always constructive. Hewould often invite eminent foreignresearchers to give talks in his office with ablackboard and chalk as their only aids.We would listen, sitting anywhere wecould. It was a simple and rich life. Theannual meeting of donors which we usedto organise was a family celebration. Wewould present our discoveries of the pastyear, dressed in our impeccable white coats.He was one of us, and we were at one withhim in this adventure.

Everything had a cause, all was reasonfor Jean Dausset. A fervent disciple ofClaude Bernard from whom heinherited the chair of experimentalmedicine at the Collège deFrance, he didhowever say, at the end of his inaugurallecture: “if there is a biochemical causefor every action, every thought, if allbehaviour is a necessary consequence ofthe genetic make-up on which all pastexperience has been imprinted, must weconclude that the free agent of whichhumans are so proud does not exist? Wemust remain in doubt until thehypothesis has been tested because it isprobably impossible to know”. Heleaves us with that question and thatdoubt.

Jean Dausset has departed this world.He leaves behind the memory of his lifeso that we can continue his work. �


Excerpt of the talk by Professor JacquesBouveresse on “Bertrand Russell,science, democracy and the pursuit oftruth”.“In ‘Free thought and officialpropaganda’, a talk delivered in 1922,Russell argued: ‘The methods ofincreasing the degree of truth in ourbeliefs are well known; they consist inhearing all sides, trying to ascertain allthe relevant facts, controlling our ownbias by discussion with people whohave the opposite bias, and cultivating areadiness to discard any hypothesiswhich has proved inadequate. Thesemethods are practiced in science, andhave built the body of scientificknowledge. […] In science, where alonesomething approximating to genuineknowledge is to be found, men’sattitude is tentative and full of doubt. Inreligion and politics, on the contrary,though there is as yet nothingapproaching scientific knowledge,

everybody considers it de rigueur tohave a dogmatic opinion, to be backedup by inflicting starvation, prison, andwar, and to be carefully guarded fromargumentative competition with anydifferent opinion. If only men could bebrought into a tentatively agnosticframe of mind about these matters,nine-tenths of the evils of the modernworld would be cured.’1The solidarity that exists betweenscience and democracy is reflected in thefact that the principle of free research,after being experimented in thetreatment of scientific questions, is likelyto spread naturally to that of politicalquestions. [...] ‘The habit of basingopinions on reason, when it has beenacquired in the scientific sphere, is aptto spread to the sphere of practicalpolitics. Why should a man enjoyexceptional power or wealth because heis the son of his father? Why shouldwhite men have privileges denied tothose with other complexions? Whyshould women be subject to men? Assoon as these questions are allowed tocome into the light of day andexamined in a rational spirit, it becomesvery difficult to resist the claims ofjustice, which demands an equaldistribution of ultimate political powersamong all adults, with the exception ofthose who are insane or criminal. It is,therefore, natural that the progress ofscience and the progress towarddemocracy have gone hand in hand.’2Russell believed that, when questions ofthis nature were posed clearly and

addressed rationally, the answer couldbut appear to be more or less obvious.It was therefore essential, for thoseseeking at all costs to maintain thestatus quo, to ensure that things werenot expressed or envisaged in a rationalspirit. One of the secrets of the successof totalitarian systems, he argued, lay inthe way in which they successfullypersuaded a large number or even amajority of people that the most basicdivergences of opinion had a sourcecausing them to defy all reason, so thattheir rational discussion was futile andderisory. On this point, Hannah Arendtmade the following comment: ‘[TheNazis] presented disagreements asinvariably originating in deep natural,social, or psychological sources beyondthe control of the individual andtherefore beyond the power of reason.This would have been a shortcomingonly if they had sincerely entered intocompetition with other parties; it wasnot if they were sure of dealing withpeople who had reason to be equallyhostile to all parties.’3 For a convincedrationalist like Russel, the danger—thatcould soon prove to be fatal—arosewhen, in a community that was stilldemocratic in principle, one allowed thegeneralization of the feeling and soonthe certainty that major disagreementsand conflicts could and had to betreated in a way which, to be seriousand effective, had to start by excludingas completely as possible all reason andrational argumentation.” �

Symposium organized by thechair of Philosophy of Languageand Knowledge (ProfessorJacques Bouveresse)28 May 2010

Videos of the papers can beconsulted and downloaded atwww.college-de-france.fr(Professor Bouveresse’s page,under audio/video)The full proceedings of thesymposium has been published in thejournal Agone n° 44 (October 2010).

1. Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1935), Allen & Unwin, 1960, p. 106.2. Bertrand Russel, Fact and Fiction (1961), Routledge, 1994, p. 105.3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1958, p 312.

RATIONALITY, TRUTH AND DEMOCRACY:BERTRAND RUSSELL, GEORGE ORWELL, NOAM CHOMSKY


Excerpt from the talk by Jean-Jacques Rosat (lecturer at theCollège de France) entitled:“Russell, Orwell, Chomsky: afamily of thought and action(From liberalism to anti-authoritarian socialism)”

“Russell argued that ‘Political and socialinstitutions are to be judged by the goodor harm that they do to individuals. Dothey encourage creativeness rather thanpossessiveness? Do they embody orpromote a spirit of reverence betweenhuman beings? Do they preserve self-respect?’1

It is noteworthy that this typicallyliberal profession of faith opened atext that soon proved to be amanifesto for an anarchizingsocialism. This was in 1916. From theoutbreak of the First World War,Russell battled for peace with theenergy of despair, and fought for theright to conscientious objection—astruggle that soon landed him in jailfor six months. That was where hebecame aware that, in anindustrialized world where there wasa prevailing force leading to theconcentration of economic and statepower that deprived individuals ofcontrol over their own existence, theliberal values underpinning hiseducation and in which he stillbelieved could be promoted onlywithin the politico-economic

framework of an anti-authoritariansocialism. In 1920 he declared: ‘I amone of those who, as a result of thewar, have passed over fromLiberalism to Socialism, not because Ihave ceased to admire many of theLiberal ideals, but because I see littlescope for them, except after acomplete transformation of theeconomic structure of society.’2

This rapid evolution in Russell’sthinking highlights the thread linkingthe original liberal mentality to anti-authoritarian socialism, and it is thislink that Noam Chomsky hasconstantly stressed. ‘Contrary to thecontemporary version of it, classicalliberalism [...] focused on the right ofpeople to control their own work, andthe need for free creative work underyour own control—for humanfreedom and creativity. So to aclassical liberal, wage labor undercapitalism would have beenconsidered totally immoral, because itfrustrates the fundamental need ofpeople to control their own work:you’re a slave to someone else. [...] Infact, there are no two points of viewmore antithetical than classicalliberalism and capitalism [...]. If youtake the basic classical liberalprinciples and apply them to themodern period, I think you actuallycome pretty close to the principlesthat animated revolutionaryBarcelona in the late 1930s—towhat’s called ‘anarcho-syndicalism’.[...] I think that’s about as high a levelas humans have yet achieved in tryingto realize their libertarian principles,which in my view are the right ones.’3

The description of revolutionaryBarcelona that Orwell discovered inDecember 1936 is one of the mostpoignant pages of Homage toCatalonia. This experience, and evenmore so the one he lived for severalmonths on the Aragonese front

mongst the POUM militia, wasobviously one of equality—anequality understood not as an end initself, a uniformization of individuals,but as the condition for real freedomand fraternity. ‘Many of the normalmotives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fearof the boss, etc.—had simply ceasedto exist. The ordinary class-division ofsociety had disappeared […] therewas no one there except the peasantsand ourselves, and no one ownedanyone else as his master.’4 Thisexperience was so decisive for Orwellbecause it mirrored his convictionthat the various forms of top-downsocialism, driven by intellectuals—beit Fabian technocratic reformism orthe Leninist vanguard—could neverlead but to a change of masters. Hebelieved that authentic socialism wasbottom-up, based on the experienceof ordinary people and on the valuesof common decency.” �

1. Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals (1917), chap 1).2. “Socialism and Liberal Ideals” (May-June 1920), Collected Papers, 15, p.144. 3. Noam Chomsky, Understanding power (2003), London: Vintage, pp. 216, 221, 222.4. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1989), London: Penguin Books (First edition 1938, Secker & Warburg, London).


Excerpt from the talk by NoamChomsky (Professor at MIT) entitled : “Power-hunger temperedby self-deception”.

“The doctrines of economicrationalism that dominatedmainstream discourse in the advancedsocieties for a generation have shapedpolicy, though selectively: one recipefor the weak, a sharply different onefor the powerful, much as in the past.It seems not unfair to say that theirdominance does not reflect eitherrationality or commitment to truth,but rather service to privilege andpower. The consequences areunmistakeable. In the US, forexample, during these years thefinancial institutions that were themain beneficiaries of the doctrines aswell as their most fervent advocateshave vastly expanded their power,with a comparable impact on politicallife. Meanwhile, for the majority ofthe population real wages havestagnated and family incomes havebeen sustained by higher workinghours, debt, and asset inflation, withregular collapse of the bubbles. Whilevery rich by comparative standards,the US is taking on some of thestructural characteristics of the formercolonies, which typically have sectorsof enormous wealth and privilegeamidst a sea of misery and suffering.

To turn to the title of these remarks,can we say that these consequencesare the outcome of power hunger andself-deception? In the terms that arecurrent today, can we blame ‘greedybankers’ who are guilty of ‘irrationalexuberance,’ the famous phrase of themost lauded economist of the past

generation before the crash, AlanGreenspan, in a rare moment ofdeparture from orthodoxy? That doesnot seem fair. When bankers are‘greedy,’ they are pursuing theirinstitutional commitment, which is tomaximize profits—in Anglo-American corporate law, a legalresponsibility. If some reject thiscommitment, they will be removedand others will take their place.‘Power hunger’ is an institutionalfeature of a competitive system.Furthermore, the exuberance of thenecessarily greedy bankers was notirrational. The bigger banks knewthat they were taking no serious riskwith transactions that might well fail,because they could rely on an implicitgovernment insurance policy, called‘too big to fail.’ Its very existence givesthem substantial benefits as comparedto rivals. And they regularly cash inwhen necessary. Under Reagan, forexample, one of the larger banks,Continental Illinois, was rescued by ataxpayer bailout. Also under Reagan,the predecessor of the huge firmCitigroup was rescued from disasterby the IMF—the ‘credit community’senforcer,’ as it was describedaccurately by its US executive director,returning to its traditional role today.As pointed out by Martin Wolf of theFinancial Times, probably the mostrespected economic correspondenttoday, the current bailout ‘is overtly arescue of Greece, but covertly a bail-out of banks.’

The same has been true during thecurrent financial crisis in the UnitedStates: the big banks were not onlyrescued by taxpayers, but ended upmore profitable and larger than

before, preparing for the next andprobably worse crisis. The bankerscan hardly be faulted for doing justwhat they should do under the rulesof the game.

After the current financial crisiserupted, a consensus developedamong economists that it is foolhardyto ignore systemic risk—that is, thethreat to the whole system if sometransaction fails. But that is hardly anew insight. An elementary feature ofmarkets is that transactions ignoreexternalities—effects on others. Forfinancial transactions, that meansignoring systemic risk. It has longbeen understood that the practice ishazardous, and there have beenoccasional warnings within theprofession. This market inefficiencyalone makes financial crash a highlylikely contingency, and the risk isamplified by the perverse incentivesthat follow from the influence ofprivate power over the politicalsystem, among them the ‘too big tofail’ government insurance policy, butothers as well.” �


The symposium focused on theeconomics of climate change andbrought together speakers and“discussants” who are internationallyreknowed for their contributions onthe subject.

The first day was devoted to theeconomics of the long run. Itreferred to the debate on the cost-benefit analysis of climate policies,which has intensified over the pastten years and was revived by thepublication of the Stern Report, inparticular. The costs of climatepolicies are effective in the shortand medium term, whereas theirbenefits, that is, the damage thatthey avoid, are manifested in themedium-long, the long and even thevery long term. But the discountrates applied in traditional cost-benefit analysis to transform thefuture values of benefits intopresent values (in technical terms,to “discount” them) so that theycan be compared to costs (also“discounted”), crush the future.There are good reasons for this tobe so, but these reasons, whichcould be seen as a form of“economic reason’, seem tocontradict ecological intuitionwhich focuses on sustainability andthe long-term preservation of theenvironment. The papers deliveredduring the first day were primarilyon the economic relevance ofclimate policies and, moregenerally, on the reconciliation of

the economic logic and thesustainable development logic.

Some of the key figures in theabove-mentioned debate werepresent. In his talk, HarvardUniversity professor MartinWeitzman again emphasized thedistribution of the probability ofdamage. This distribution has whateconomists call ‘thick tails’, whichmeans that the density of theprobability of extreme damage,seen as a function of the amount ofsuch damage, decreases ‘slowly’. Asthe title of his paper indicates, fromthis point of view the targets ofGreenhouse Gas (GHG)concentrations must be seen as asort of “insurance againstcatastrophic climate damages’. Thisargument, in which the avoidanceof catastrophe is crucial, waschallenged by William Nordhaus,professor at Yale University. In hispaper entitled ‘Economic policy inthe face of severe tail events’,Professor Nordhaus, one of themost rigorous advocates of thetraditional theses, considered theproblems of statistical estimatesand issues of measurement ofeconomic losses. His talk wasdiscussed by Partha Sen, professorat the Dehli School of Economics,while Professor Weitzman’s paperwas commented on by NicholasStern.

The questioning of traditionaleconomic logic with regard todiscount rates is thus based on the‘extreme’ uncertainty that isindisputably present in climatechange. A change in the earth’smean temperature of over fivedegrees plunges us into theunknown, the probabilisticdescription of which echoes the firsttwo papers. There are otherchannels through which the

economic problematic is grasped,which also relate to uncertainty butin a different way. ‘Ecologicalintuition versus economic reason’,the title of Roger Guesnerie’spaper,1 is about the rules of an‘ecological’ economic evaluation ofan ‘irreversible damage to theenvironment’. The text derives a‘precautionary principle’ thatclarifies the generally imprecise—tosay the least—notion of ‘acceptableeconomic cost’. The conclusions areclearly established in a worldreduced to four parameters brieflydescribing: the productive capacity;the trade-off determining desiredtimeless growth; ecological‘sensitivity? and, finally, the ‘ethical’dimension of the inter-generationaltrade-off. The discussion of thelatter dimension, that is, the ethicaldimension of the problem, wasconsidered in greater depth byProfessor Cameron Hepburn ofOxford University, who put theentire debate of the discount rateback into this perspective byemphasizing the compatibility aswell as the differences withtraditional economic approaches.Roger Guesnerie’s paper wascommented on by Professor JamesMirrlees from CambridgeUniversity, winner of the NobelPrize for Economics in 1996.

This colloquium was organizedjointly by the ‘SustainableDevelopment—Environment, Energyand Society’ chair, held by NicholasStern in the 2009–2010 academicyear, and the ‘Economic Theory andSocial Organization’ chair held byRoger Guesnerie.7–8 June 2010

1. Based on a paper co-authored with O. Guéant and J.M. Lasry.

Professor Roger Guesnerie

MANAGING CLIMATE CHANGE


Reverting to uncertainty, anotherdirection for potentially fruitfulconfrontation between traditionalcalculation and calculation thatstresses the ecological logic more,suggests the relevance of theconcept of ‘ambiguity’. There isambiguity, in the technical sense,when hesitation on the uncertaintyof a particular situation challengesthe construction of subjectiveprobability and thus affects thetransposition, in the analysis, of therisky choices of the probabilisticlogic expressed in traditionalcriteria. The earlier work ofChristian Gollier,2 professor at theToulouse School of Economics, onrisky timeless choices, is set in the‘Bayesian’ tradition of usingexpected utility. In the paper that hedelivered at the symposium,Professor Gollier analyzed theeffects of the introduction ofambiguity into the analysis of the‘socially effective discount rate’,and showed that the biasesintroduced are not systematic.

The contribution of ThomasSterner3 from GothenburgUniversity considered ‘climatepolicy, prudence and the role oftechnological innovation’. In asense, his talk was equally relevantto the main theme of the first dayand that of the second day, wherethe focus was on issues pertaining

to innovation. Professor Sterneremphasized the relative merits ofemission reduction and research-development, depending on thecharacteristics of the technologiesand the uncertainty weighing ontheir results. His paper wasdiscussed by Antoine d’Autume,professor at Paris I University andthe Paris School of Economics.

The other papers delivered on the firstday were mainly selected fromproposals in response to a call put outby the French Economics Association(Association française de scienceséconomiques). All of them highlightedthe time dimension of environmentalproblems. Michel de Lara from theUniversity of Paris Est examined theissue of the ‘Risk and sustainability: isviability that far from optimality?’.Charles Figuières from the Frenchnational agronomic research institute(INRA) confronted the regularinterpretation of the Rawlsian view(that of philosopher John Rawls) ofinter-generational equity, with a so-called ‘mixed’ criterion ofinter-temporal social choice (withreference to both Bentham andRawls). Fabien Prieur from theUniversity of Savoie and his co-authors discussed ‘the optimal controlof pollution under uncertainty andirreversibility’, while Jean-CharlesHourcade from the InternationalCentre for Research on theEnvironment and Developmentexamined the ‘determinants of thesocial cost of carbon: public economicprinciples in a controversial future.’4

On the second day the focus shiftedto innovation and the stimulationof innovation for climate policy,with issues of risk, uncertainty andinternational cooperation eitherdirectly present or in thebackground.

In the morning Nicholas Sternprovided a systematic analysis ofthe questions raised by growth witha low level of carbon consumption.First he considered innovation andtechnical change, with a historicalperspective on the current problem.He then examined the redefinitionof appropriate public policies andfinally discussed the multiple facetsof the political economy (asopposed to the economy strictosensu) of a global agreement.

The following contribution, byAlberta University professorUjjayant Chakravort, was entitled:‘Can nuclear power supply cleanenergy in the long run? A modelwith endogenous substitution ofresources.’5 In several contrastingscenarios, this model simulates theproportion of nuclear energy in theenergy mix on the 2100 timeline.The results were discussed byProfessor Pierre Noel Giraud fromthe École des Mines de Paris.

The paper delivered by HarvardUniversity professor PhilippeAghion was on ‘Climate changeand the role of directedinnovation.’6 It was based on amodel of endogenous innovation inwhich incentives to invest either in‘clean’ technologies or else in ‘dirty’Professor James Mirrlees

Professor Nicholas Stern

2. Paper co-authored with Johannes Gierlinger.3. Co-authored with Carolyn Fischer.4. The supporting papers were by the following authors: i) for the first paper, Michel de Lara, Vincent Martinet and Luc Doyen; ii) for the second paper,Charles Figuières, Ngo Van Long and Mabel Tidball; iii) for the third paper, Alain Ayong Le Kama and Aude Pommeret, and Fabien Prieur; iv) for the fourthpaper, Jean-Charles Hourcade, Patrice Dumas and Baptiste Perrissin Fabert. 5. Paper by Ujjayant Chakravorty, Bertrand Magne and Michel Moreaux.6 Co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, Leonardo Burstzyn and David Hemous.


ones was affected by the form andintensity of climate policy. AlexBowen of the London School ofEconomics commented on themodel and the qualitative resultsderived from it.

The afternoon’s papers focused notonly on innovation but also onissues of institutions andnegotiations that Nicholas Stern’stalk had introduced.

The talk by Maryland Universityprofessor Thomas Schelling, winnerof the Nobel Prize for Economics,emphasized the new institutionsrequired for international climatecooperation, and related issues ofgovernance. Based on historicalprecedents (Marshall Plan, Bretton-Woods), he highlighted thenecessity to provide developingcountries with substantial,efficiently organized aid. This paperwas discussed by another specialiston the subject, Professor HenryTulkens from the CatholicUniversity of Louvain.

Jean Tirole, professor at the ToulouseSchool of Economics, discussed‘regional initiatives’ and the ‘cost ofdelaying climate change agreements’.His model emphasized what can becalled the ratchet effectsaffecting climatenegotiations when, paradoxically, thegood environmental performance of thefirst period weakens the position fornegotiating in the second period. His

presentation was commented on byJean-Pierre Ponssard, senior researcherat the École Polytechnique.

The last paper was by HumbertoLlavador,7 professor at theUniversitat Pompeu Fabra, whoplaced the two days’ discussions ina general perspective. Hispresentation of a ‘dynamic analysisof human welfare on a warmingplanet’ was commented on by JeanPhilippe Nicolaï (Collège de France,chair of Economic Theory andSocial Organization).

Finally, in addition to the scientificpapers, a round table on climatepolicy issues was held on the secondday after the morning’s talks.Presided by Roger Guesnerie, thisround table made it possible tocompare the views of NicholasStern, Thomas Sterner, Jean Tiroleand Henry Tulkens.

To conclude, the organizers wish tothank those who contributed tofacilitating the two days, especiallythe chairpersons (excludingspeakers), Guy Laroque (INSEE)and Olivier Godard (ÉcolePolytechnique).

With the exception of the roundtable, the symposium was scientificand the papers were technical.Despite its high level ofspecialization, the two-day eventwas attended by a large audiencethat was clearly familiar with thetopics discussed. �

7 Co-authored with John Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre.

Professor Thomas Schelling

The Sustainable Development—Environment, Energy and Society chair

receives support from TOTAL.


On January 12 2010, at 4:53 p.m., the E/W Enriquillofault started to yield at a depth of 13 km, 25 km SSWof Port-au-Prince. The rupture propagated toward theWest during 35 seconds along a distance of about 50km without ever reaching the surface. But most of themechanical energy was dissipated during the first tenseconds with a fault displacement that reached amaximum of 4 m. The northern lip of the fault movedto the West with respect to the southern lip. This iswhat specialists call a strike-slip fault. Although theresulting earthquake was a great earthquake with amagnitude of 7, it was not a very great earthquake. Forexample the energy was 900 times less than the energydissipated during the 2004 Sumatra earthquake. Manygreater earthquakes have occurred in modern times. Yetwith about 300 000 human fatalities, the Haitiearthquake appears to have been the deadliest. Why?As is often said: earthquakes do not kill... but humanbuildings do. Haiti is the extreme illustration ofproblems coming from anarchic development withoutany consideration for the environment.

But let us go back to the tectonic context of this landthat became home for the Haitian people. Haiti islocated on the E/W northern border of the Caribbeanplate. North of the border, the American plate moves tothe West at a velocity of 20 mm/yr. This border is notlinear. It is rather a 200 km wide border zone, sometimecalled the Gonave plate, limited by two main greatfaults, the Septentrional fault to the North and theEnriquillo fault to the South. The total 20 mm/yr strike-slip motion is distributed between these two faults,about 10 mm/yr on each. Actually it is difficult toexactly define how the motion is partitioned because ofthe complex elastic interactions between the two faults.But, in a first approximation, each fault takes abouthalf of the motion. These two faults are the mainelements of the structural framework of the island ofHispaniola, Haiti corresponding to the western portionof the island. However the tectonic system is actuallyeven more complex, as the Septentrional fault veers tothe SE within the island and as, consequently, theGonave plate tapers eastward, the eastern corner being

located NW of the island of Puerto Rico. Further East,the plate boundary is unique and follows the PuertoRico trench. The eastward junction of the twoboundaries produces compressive deformation withinthe central portion of Hispaniola, within NW/SEmountains which form the core of the island. It is thisdeformation that has created the present morphologyof the island.

Thus there are three main sources of large earthquakesin Haiti, the Septentrional fault to the N and NE of theisland, the Enriquillo fault to the SW and themountains in the central portion. This is verified by thedistribution of historical seismicity, although it is poorlylocalized, except for the relatively recent triple 1946earthquake. Specialists have identified ten earthquakesthat appear to have reached or exceeded magnitude 7since the XVIth century, that is one about every fiftyyears. Three of them could be along the southern fault,four along the northern one, and three would haveresulted from shortening in the central mountains. Thelast earthquakes that destroyed Port-au-Prince datefrom 1751 and 1770. The town had just been foundedby the French and Louis XV had chosen it as thecapital. Following the destructions of the earthquakes,it was forbidden to build there with anything exceptwood, which was quite reasonable. It is thus clear thatno part of Haiti can escape destructive earthquakes.Actually specialists had announced in 2008 that theEnriquillo fault could be affected by a 7.2 earthquakeat any time and that the Septentrional fault couldsimilarly be struck by a 7.5 earthquake, still pending.

But, what could have been done by the government ofthe 9 millions inhabitants of Haiti, a country where thedensity of the population exceeds 325/km2, 80% ofwhich live below the level of poverty, to prevent thisdisaster? Of course, technically, it is possible to buildin such a way that the danger of earthquakes isminimized for the population. But with the desperatecontext of struggle for survival in this country, it wasprobably illusory to expect a real politic of mitigationof the destructive effects of earthquakes. One only has

THE TRAGEDY OF THE HAITI

EARTHQUAKE

Professor Xavier le PichonChair of Geodynamics 1986–2008


to consider the failure of the reforestation program inspite of the enormous cost of the generalizeddeforestation that cannot be stopped in Haiti. Yet thedramatic effects of this deforestation are experimentedrepeatedly during the yearly cyclones! It seems to methat this tragedy is an illustration of the challenges thatour society must confront to come out of the crisis inwhich our humanity appears to progressively getsubmerged. How can we facilitate a reasonableimplantation of the population within an environmentunder control when the context is one of extremepoverty? In this somber outlook, the hope comes fromthe remarkable qualities that have been manifested by

the Haitian people during this tragedy and from thesurge of international solidarity that it triggered. �

Xavier Le Pichon, Emeritus Professorof the Collège de France

with the collaboration of Claude Rangin, Tiphaine Zitterand Agnès Crespy of the Egérie team of Collège de France

More informations: the best source is the website ofEric Calais, professor at Purdue University:http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ecalais/haiti/

Tectonic context of theJanuary 12 earthquake. Theprobable locations of themain historical earthquakesare identified by a red star.The year of the earthquakeis next. The yellow pointmarks the location of Port-au-Prince. The black arrowsare the GPS velocity vectorswith respect to theCaribbean plate. Les circleswith a black dot in thecenter indicate where thevelocity vectors are smallwith respect to the errors ofmeasurement. These pointsare located on the southernportion of Hispaniola andconsequently belong to theCaribbean plate.PR: Puerto RicoRD: Dominican RepublicH: HaitiData from Éric Calais.

The rupture of the January12 2010 earthquake ofHaiti. The yellow starmarks the localization ofthe epicenter and the reddots those of the mainaftershocks, after theUSGS. The wide bandidentifies the probable zoneof rupture.


Jean Dausset passed away on 6 June 2009, at the age of93. He held the chair of Experimental Medicine from1977 to 1987, and is to thank for one of the mostimportant discoveries in the history of immunology:that of the HLA system. In 1952, he observed that thecombination of a patient’s white blood cells withanother donor’s serum triggered an agglutination effect.From this he deduced that anti-white blood cellantibodies existed in the patient’s body, and showedthat these were the result of the many bloodtransfusions that the patient had undergone. Theexistence of blood groups for red blood cells wasalready known; Dausset showed that the same went forwhite blood cells, but with groups of a different nature,that were far more complex. Years of work and thestudy of blood samples from large numbers of patientsand volunteer donors were necessary. In 1958, heidentified the first leukocyte group, speculated on itsgenetic origin and emphasized its probable importancefor organ transplants. The HLA system was born, withmultiple implications: firstly medical ones, fortransplants. It also had immunological implications:thousands of researchers in the world—myselfincluded—set out to isolate genes, to determine themolecular origins of transplantation antigens, and tounderstand the cellular reactions associated with theHLA. It had anthropological implications: the HLA canbe used as a marker of individuals and therefore of themigration and mixing of human populations. Lastly, ithad genetic implications, since the polymorphism of theHLA opened the way for the analysis of other

polymorphisms in human beings. This is what led JeanDausset, in 1984, to create the Centre d’études despolymorphismes humains (CEPH—Centre for thestudy of human polymorphisms), transformed into theFondation Jean Dausset in 1993, where the firstdetailed genetic mapping of human beings wasdeveloped—a prelude to sequencing the humangenome. In 1980, along with Baruj Benacerraf andGeorge D. Snell, Jean Dausset received the Nobel Prizein Physiology and Medicine which honoured, alongwith many other distinctions, his discovery of the HLA.

This is the story that one finds in the textbooks. Yetscientists often provide a formal reconstruction of thehistory of science that is very different from the actualstory, which they struggle to tell. Their reconstructionsometimes provides a regrettable approximation of thelived reality. In the case of Jean Dausset, it is simplyerroneous.

Born in Toulouse in 1916, he studied medicine, but wasinterrupted by the war in 1939. Although drafted intothe army, in 1940 he was able to get back to Paris toprepare for an internship, which he obtained in 1941.In the following year, after reading a small posterdisplayed at the Saint-Louis hospital, he enrolled andleft for North Africa. Starting off as an ambulancedriver, he then became a blood transfuser andresuscitator. He found himself confronted with aconstant stream of wounded patients who, in difficultand uncertain conditions, needed reanimation,

Jean Dausset 1916–2009Chair of Experimental Medicine

1977–1987

by Philippe Kourilsky

OBITUARY


operations, and transfusions. A transfuser he remained:once back in Paris in 1945, he was appointed to theCentre for blood transfusion at the Saint-Antoinehospital. In 1961 he joined the Centre Hayem at theSaint-Louis hospital, alongside Jean Bernard.

To transfuse, blood is needed. Human beings areneeded to give blood to other human beings.Transfusion is the expression of a human bond, ofwhich Jean Dausset became an promoter. He expressedit in all his activities; not only scientific and medical,but also social and societal ones. For instance, heexpressed it in his taste for art: in 1946 he opened abookshop in Paris, rue du Dragon in the 6th

arrondissement, that later became an avant-gardegallery frequented by André Breton and many others.Fernand Léger, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Alechinsky, etc.,exhibited their work there. He also expressed it in hisdesire to serve the community: from 1955 to 1958, JeanDausset was a member of the cabinet of the Minister ofEducation, where he defended and planned the“Debré” reforms of medical studies and of theuniversity-hospital system, which allowed for full-timework in hospitals and for medical research to flourish.The importance of the human bond was also evidencedin his commitment to promoting responsibility amongscientists: from 1984 to 2001, he chaired the UniversalMovement for Scientific Responsibility (MURS).Finally, we witness it in his research activities: in fact

this is the lens through which his scientific and medicalwork should be seen, since they were largelyunderpinned by this human bond.

Jean Dausset would probably not have been able tocarry out his work and to make his importantdiscoveries, had he not had access to patients, of course,but also blood donors and later organ donors. Herespected donors, and donors respected him. At theNobel Prize ceremony he chose to be accompanied bytwo of them. He received, but was driven by the desireto give back, not only through individual medicalactivity but also by organizing the pooling ofknowledge and resources to benefit the community. Theinternational conference and workshops on the HLAbear witness to this, as well as the creation of France-Transplant in 1969 and of France-Greffe de Moelle in1987. A particularly noteworthy application for thissharing culture was found in a strictly scientific sectorfrom which it had previously been virtually absent. Thecreation of the CEPH in 1984 was made possiblethanks to the sale of a collection of paintings donatedby a woman who had recognized him on television.Jean Dausset used them in the simplest and best waythere was. He started to gather blood samples from 61large donor families. Their DNA was extracted,preserved and analysed, and many geneticpolymorphisms were mapped: close to 200 as early as1992—several million today. His ties with theAssociation française contre la myopathie (AFM—French Muscular Dystrophy Association) and thecreation of the Généthon in 1991 brilliantly magnifiedthis effort that led to the growing precision of humangenome mapping and made its sequencing possible.France thus opened the way to organized sharing inbiological experimentation, and Jean Dausset can beconsidered as one of the founders of human moleculargenetics.

We will no longer see the slender, slightly hunchedsilhouette of Jean Dausset, nor his warm gaze, full ofhumour and even mischief. He has been honoured inmany ways, many times. But beyond the official story,let us remember his humanity. Jean Dausset wascertainly a great scientist, but he was also and perhapsfirst and foremost a human being, a great human being,whose science was great because it was human. �

Professor Philippe KourilskyChair of Molecular Immunology


Claude Lévi-Strauss died on 30 October 2009, a fewdays before his 101st birthday. He was born on 28November 1908 into a family where the arts werecultivated: painting, which was his father’s profession;music, in which his great-grandfather, composer andconductor Isaac Strauss had won renown; andliterature, at which he tried his hand at a very early age.A good student, but a dabbler, he studied bothphilosophy and law but devoted much of his energy toactivism in the SFIO,1 of which he saw himself at onestage becoming the official theoretician. Fortunately forscience, fate decided otherwise. After his agrégation2 inphilosophy and a brief period in secondary education,of which he retained a gloomy memory, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ life changed direction in the autumn of 1934when Célestin Bouglé suggested he join the Frenchuniversity mission at Sao Paulo University to lecture insociology. There he discovered a country that he wouldbe particularly fond of for the rest of his life. Above all,he discovered ethnology in the field, for which he haddeveloped a taste by reading Robert Lowie, and whichhe was able to practice during university holidays. Hisfirst mission was in 1935–1936 to study the Caduveoand Bororo in the Mato Grosso do Sul. This wasfollowed by an eight-month mission during which,mandated by the Musée de l’Homme that Paul Rivethad just founded, he resided first among theNambikwara of the north of the Mato Grosso and thenwith the Tupi-Monde and the Tupi-Kawahib on theBolivian border.

In this respect, allow me a few words on Claude Lévi-Strauss the ethnographer, so often overlooked. He

himself acknowledged his lack of patience needed forthe painstaking work that the collection ofethnographic data required. Taking him literally, manycommentators saw him exclusively as an armchairanthropologist. Yet his complementary thesis on theNambikwara, as well as many articles that he wrote onvarious aspects of the life of the populations amongwhich he sojourned, clearly show that nothing aboutthem remained foreign to him, from the symbolism ofthe colours of their fletchings and the Bororos’ penilesheaths, to those features of the Nambikwara languagethat were comparable to Chibcha. Moreover, most ofhis analyses of the institutions of these people, withwhom he actually spent relatively little time, wereamply confirmed by the ethnographers who, 40 or 50years later, studied them in far greater depth. Finally,there is no doubt that his experience with the AmericanIndians, by enabling him to witness the functioning ofinstitutions—albeit undermined—that had previouslyseemed to him to exist in books only, contributed toimprinting in him a philosophy of social life that neverleft him. Hence, the importance of the mutualdependence that Bororo moieties fostered, where all theimportant acts in an individual’s life, from birth rites tofuneral rites, were accomplished by the members of theother moiety, could but consolidate in him the idea thatreciprocity was the basis of any society. And it wascertainly also his fondness for the Nambikwara, thatstatic and crystalline island beaten by the waves of anunkind historical future, that fed the idea of the so-called ‘cold’ societies which desperately tried to freezeevents to prevent their effects from snowballing out ofcontrol.

Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009Chair of Social Anthropology

1959–1982

by Philippe Descola

1. Precursor of the current Socialist Party. [Transl.]2. State competitive examination to qualify for teaching posts at high-school and university level. [Transl.]


Claude Lévi-Strauss returned to France on the eve ofthe war, in which he participated as a liaison officer,but was struck after armistice by the anti-Semitic lawsof the Vichy regime and managed to leave the countryfor the United States. There he taught at the NewSchool for Social Research in New York. He joined theFree French Forces, was assigned to the Frenchscientific mission to the US, and founded the ÉcoleLibre des Hautes Études de New York where he wasappointed general secretary. It was during this period inthe US that Claude Lévi-Strauss became a full-fledgedanthropologist. The discipline was more establishedand older there than in France. A network of Chairs,institutions and journals inspired him and, above all, along tradition of fieldwork had produced anextraordinarily rich documentation on the Indians ofNorth America, on which he drew for many of hissubsequent studies. It was also in New York thatClaude Lévi-Strauss discovered the systematic study ofkinship, a field that until then had been neglected inFrance and to which he devoted all his efforts forseveral years. Finally, New York was where he metanother refugee, Roman Jakobson, who initiated himinto linguistics and became his friend. This was the richmelting pot that spawned structural anthropology, lessa new stream in an established science than a newknowledge method, forged in the treatment ofproblems peculiar to a discipline.

From a very early stage Claude Lévi-Strauss wasconvinced that social science was built not on the basisof manifest reality but by elucidating the subconsciousorder where the rational correspondence between theproperties of thought and those of the world arerevealed. In structural phonology he discovered an idealmodel to apply his intuition, and in the abundantethnographic literature that he studied in New York,the material to substantiate it. This model had fournoteworthy characteristics: it focused not on consciousphenomena but rather on the subconsciousinfrastructure; it analysed not terms but relationsbetween them; it sought to show that these relationsformed a system; and it aimed to discover general laws.During this period Lévi-Strauss posited that, combined,these four approaches could contribute to illuminatingproblems of kinship because of the formal analogy thatit revealed between phonemes and the terms used todenote relatives. Both are elements whose meaningstems from their combination into systems, themselvesproducts of the subconscious functioning of the mind,and whose recurrence in many places of the worldsuggests that they comply with universal laws.

Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, the thesis forhis PhD obtained after his return to France in 1948,was a masterly variation on this initial intuition,

immediately saluted in the world as a revolution in theway of addressing kinship phenomena. In it, Lévi-Strauss rejected the point of view of the sociology ofkinship groups and that of their conjectural historicalreconstruction, replacing it with a general theory of thealliance of marriage which, in turn, elucidated thenature and functioning of the social units at play inkinship and situated them in a broader set. He alsoestablished the generality of the rules ordering systemsof matrimonial exchange based on the structures of themind. He saw this as the only logical base forconfirming the hypothesis of the unity of humans in thediversity of their cultural productions.

Appointed by Lucien Febvre in 1948 to the new 6th

Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, thennominated in 1949 as Research Director to the 5th

Section of the same institution, Claude Lévi-Straussgradually turned away from sociological studies todevote himself to the study of the variousmanifestations of ‘savage’ thinking, an ideal way tounderstand the functioning of the mind. The systems ofclassification, myths and ritual operations of societieswithout writing relate to the qualities of the objects ofthe world and the connections that can be madebetween them. Their study is therefore an ideal way ofhighlighting mental operations that do not differfundamentally from those of scientific thinking, even ifthe phenomena to which they apply and the knowledgethat they produce may make them seem very distant.Practised first on sensitive categories, savage thinkinguncovers and orders the remarkable characters ofnatural objects to convert them into signs of theirhidden properties. To be sure, these signs are stillpartially submerged in the images from which theydraw their existence, but they do nevertheless have asufficient degree of autonomy compared to theirreferents to be able to be used, within their limitedcategory, for purposes other than those for which theywere initially intended. The logic of the sensible is thusan ‘intellectual bricolage’ exploiting a small repertoireof permutating relations within a set that forms asystem. Hence, structural analysis aims not only toelucidate the logic at play in mythical thinking, butalso, through the study of ‘the thinking of savages’, toilluminate the part of ‘the savage mind’ that each of usstill has left over from before the great rationaldomestication.

In 1959 Claude Lévi-Strauss was elected Professor atthe Collège de France, after two unsuccessfulapplications and thanks to the decisive support ofMaurice Merleau-Ponty. Although the title of his chairwas ‘Social Anthropology’, most of his research andteaching was devoted to mythical thinking, leading tothe publication from 1964 to 1971 of the four volumes


of Mythologiques. Claude Lévi-Strauss argued thatmyths, more so than other products of savage thinking,were the fruit of a creative liberty freed from theconstraints of the real. Shedding light on the laws oftheir functioning should therefore make it possible tofurther our understanding of a mind that takes itself asan object, without talking subjects being aware of howit does so. Taken separately, each myth is indeed anunreasonable story, without true signification apartfrom the moral lesson that those recounting itsometimes feel entitled to infer from it. Meaningproceeds not from the content of a favoured myth, butfrom the resonance of thousands of myths which, overand above the apparent diversity of their content andthe distance between the peoples that invented them,weave a constantly-changing logical web around theworld. The multiple combinations of these myths definethe closed field of the operations of the human mind.Hence, the structural analysis of myths cannot claim tobe exhaustive. Advancing in pace with the associationsof a syntagmatic chain starting from a randomly chosenreference myth, it can aspire only to carve out of thisimmense web fragmented matrices of signification thata different path might have disregarded.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’ abundant scientific work shouldnot make us forget the importance of his moralthinking. Constantly denouncing the concurrentimpoverishment of the diversity of cultures and naturalspecies, he always saw anthropology as a tool forcriticizing prejudices, notably racial ones, as well as ameans for implementing a ‘generalized’ humanism. Bythat he meant a humanism no longer limited, as in theRenaissance, to Western societies only, but one thattook into account the experience and knowledge of allhuman societies, both past and present. Far fromleading to an improbable global civilization thatabolished singularities, this type of humanism would,on the contrary, take into account the fact that withregard to aesthetics and spirituality, any true creationrequires both individuals and cultures to draw on theirparticularisms in order to contrast them better withother values. The question of aesthetics is a themerunning throughout Claude Lévi-Strauss’ thinking. Notonly did he consider forms of artistic expression—orones perceived as such—of non-Western societies bothas a challenge to the rationality of the West and alegitimate subject of anthropological knowledge, healso fed his work with in-depth reflection on the role ofmusic and art as mediations between the sensible andthe intelligible, which made it a crucial contribution toaesthetic theory.

In 1963, with the publication of Anthropologiestructurale in English,3 Susan Sontag published anarticle on Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled ‘A Hero of ourTime’. Above all, she was commending TristesTropiques, comparing it to Montaigne’s Essais andadmiring the lucid heroism of this observer of humans,whose pessimism never led him to discouragement. Yetwe can say that Claude Lévi-Strauss was heroic inanother sense too, when he took the risk of buildingthat which, in many respects, was a new science, andwhen, through his own practice, he set for it such a highstandard of requirement and intellectual virtuosity thathe was never sure of being followed or evenunderstood. The future will tell whether his work—inmy opinion the most significant of the 20th century inits field—will continue for a long time to act as acatalyst, as it has done in the past decades. The hundredor so books devoted to him seem to indicate that thiswill be so. �

Professor Philippe DescolaChair of Anthropology of Nature

3. Structural Anthropology.


Jean Yoyotte passed away on 1 July last year. He wasborn on 4 August 1927 in Lyon, into a family fromMartinique. His father was a chemical engineer witha senior position in the company Rhône-Poulenc,which soon led him to settle in Paris. Thus, in 1932,at the age of five, Jean Yoyotte became a Parisian, andremained so until his death. To be more exact, hebecame a citizen of the 5th arrondissement and, evenmore precisely, of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève,for he studied at the Lycée Henri IV and his life endedin his flat in the Rue Monge. Yet behind this limitedtopography lay the vast horizons of Jean Yoyotte’scareer, fed by the prestigious institutions that hefrequented in that area.

His studies at Henri IV left Jean Yoyotte with twovaluable assets: an insatiable curiosity, and a deepfriendship with Serge Sauneron that developed in theiryouth through their discovery, together, of thepharaoh’s Egypt. This friendship lasted until the tragicdeath of Serge Sauneron in 1976 at the age of 49, whenhe was head of the Institut Français d’ArchéologieOrientale and the leader in his field. The loisirs dirigésmade compulsory in 1936 by the Léon Blumgovernment had the unexpected effect of binding themembers of the ‘Egyptian club’ founded by the twofriends’ art teacher. They were joined by GérardGodron who ended his career as professor ofEgyptology at Paul Valéry University. All threegradually migrated from the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève to the École du Louvre and the ÉcolePratique des Hautes Études. Jean Yoyotte followed theclasses of the masters of those days: Jean Sainte FareGarnot, Jacques-Jean Clère, Michel Malinine, JacquesVandier, Gustave Lefebvre, and Georges Posener, ofwhom he became a disciple.

After obtaining his baccalauréat in 1945, Jean Yoyottestudied for a bachelor’s degree in history and in 1948joined the CNRS as a trainee. He was assigned to thechair of Pierre Montet at the Collège de France. Bothwere to change his life: the Collège, which he neverreally left, even though he regularly crossed the RueSaint Jacques to the other pole of his career, the ÉcolePratique des Hautes Études; and Pierre Montet, fromwhom he inherited his fascination with Tanis and ofwhom he was to be one of the successors at the Collège.

Jean Yoyotte studied at the École Pratique des HautesÉtudes (4th Section) in 1951 and in the following yearobtained a diplôme d’études supérieures in history. In1953 this enabled him to join the Institut Françaisd’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo as a scientific member.He remained in Egypt until 1957. Those were not easytimes in a country that was challenging the foundationsof its society, but Jean Yoyotte managed to travelextensively, often with Bernard Bothmer who remaineda friend throughout his life. He visited the sites to whichhe would later devote many studies: Heliopolis, KomAbou Billou, Saft el-Henna, Abusir Bana, el-Kom el-Kebir, Samanoud, Mendes, Tell Rozan, Tell Abu Yasin,Horbeit, etc. Jean Yoyotte was fascinated above all bythe sites of the delta, to which he devoted most of hisresearch. On the basis of this first experience in thefield, compared with the historical sources, he wrote anarticle in 1961 that was to be one of his main works:‘Les principautés du delta au temps de l’anarchielibyenne’. In this article he organized the complexdocumentation of that period, providing a newsynthesis that was to serve as a basis for subsequentwork on the same subject, primarily that of FaroukGomàa and Kenneth A. Kitchen. The geography of thedelta and, more particularly, its religious geography

Jean Yoyotte 1927–2009Chair of Egyptology

1991–1997

by Nicolas Grimal


were to be the main theme of his teaching at the ÉcolePratique des Hautes Études from 1964, when hesucceeded Jean Sainte-Fare Garnot who passed awayprematurely and who had been his director at theInstitut Français d’Archéologie Oriental for four years.Since his return from Egypt he had revived his ties withthe Collège and rediscovered the library of the CabinetChampollion where he had formerly been a librarianfor a short while.

In 1964 Jean Yoyotte took up the post of projectmanager at Tanis, where the archaeological work hadbeen interrupted in 1956. There he conducted tencampaigns, until 1984, and carried out painstakingwork recording and classifying, both in the field andon the archives of the Montet mission. He ordered asystematic review of the site and explored majorsectors: the temple of Khonsu, the area of the SacredLake, the south of the temple of Mout and, of course,the necropolis, one of Pierre Montet’s main discoveriesduring the Second World War.

At the same time, as part of the Centre deDocumentation d’Histoire des Religions, he createdand ran the Vladimir Golenischeff Centre, whichcurrently still has the core scientific documentation ofthe Montet archives and which further enriched JeanYoyotte’s personal library.

A fine result of this patient collation and fieldwork wasthe exhibition on the treasures of Tanis, which openedin 1987 at the Grand Palais in Paris and then movedon to the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille,before an international tour. In 1984 Philippe Brissaudtook over as director of this site of immense potential,as the discovery of the Sacred Lake at Mout in that yearevidenced.

Jean Yoyotte was elected professor at the Collège deFrance on 30 June 1991. He lectured there from 1992up to his retirement in 1997, essentially on late Egypt,thus moving ever closer to the Greek period and therole that the great cities of the delta played in it, namelyNaucratis and, more recently, Heracleon-Thonis. Hisinterest in the Greek presence dated back to hisEgyptian years when he helped Father du Bourguetdraw up an epigraphic inventory of Deir el-Medina andAbydos. During that project he had started to recordCarian and Cypriot graffiti. Jean Yoyotte’s Greekstudies occupied the rest of his life, much of the timewith the scientific collaboration of Olivier Masson andthen, in recent years, with André Bernand.

For a quarter century at the École Pratique des HautesÉtudes, and then for six years at the Collège de France,Jean Yoyotte imparted rich and varied learning,

contributing to the education of generations ofEgyptologists, both French and of other nationalities.For my generation, his classes, along with those of JeanLeclant, Georges Posener, Jacques-Jean Clère and PaulBarguet, were the main source of our training. Histeaching ranged from Egyptian grammar to the variousaspects of religion, through geography, priesthood, andfunereal literature. We followed the virtuosity of theMaster who readily studied original or unknown textswith us.

Jean Yoyotte’s scientific work reflects his constantlyaroused curiosity. Historian above all, he was also ageographer and a philologist. His studies encompass awide range of subjects, including toponymy, royalty, theprosopography of private individuals, anthroponymy,institutions, economics, society, the pantheon andreligious conceptions. Each study was an opportunityfor a dense and enriching framing from a newperspective. The scope of this short article does notenable me to list his abundant and varied scientificproduction. I simply wish to mention that all of hisstudies, even those devoted to what seemed like a detailbefore he examined them, still are and will always beunavoidable sources for researchers.

The general public is acquainted with Jean Yoyottethrough his collective books. The most famous isprobably Le Dictionnaire de la civilisation égyptienne,edited by Georges Posener and Serge Sauneron.Published in 1959, it was repeatedly reprinted and anew revised edition is forthcoming. Jean Yoyotte alsocontributed to L’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, with threearticles on Egyptian history, art and mentalities. In1968 he furthermore published Les Trésors despharaons and, more recently, in 2005, with PascalVernus, a Bestiaire des pharaons.

As fate would have it, the major volume on Darius’Palace at Susa, edited by Jean Perrot, was published justlast week, and Chapter 3 is by Jean Yoyotte: the finalpublication of the Egyptian statues of Darius,discovered in 1973. This chapter is characterized notonly by the erudition and precision of the historian, butalso by the vision and the sharp intelligence of the greatscholar who has left us. �

Professor Nicolas GrimalChair of Pharaonic Civilization: Archaeology, Philology, History


Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) taught physics theory at theCollège de France from 1932 to 1948. Additionally, he washeir to a great scientific legacy that strengthened hisattachment to this prestigious institution, for he followed inthe footsteps of both his grandfather, Eleuthère Mascart,chair of Experimental Physics from 1872 to 1908 (succeededby Paul Langevin), and his father, Marcel Brillouin, chair ofPhysics Theory and Mathematics from 1900 to 1931.

As the surname Brillouin was already associated withmany breakthroughs in physics, the young Léon also hadto find a place for himself—and succeeded brilliantly indoing so. The work of this scientist, at the summit ofFrench physics theory between the two World Wars, bothwitnessing and taking part in the quantum revolution andcovering a vast range of subjects, illustrates a significantpart of modern physics. In this article we consider one ofthe main themes underlying his scientific career, from thephysics of undulatory phenomena to information theory inthe immediate post-WWII years.

The young Léon first worked on waves as early as 1913,during a year spent training in Munich under the alreadyfamous physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, after graduatingfrom the École Normale Supérieure. His research therewon him renown, particularly his prediction of theexistence of a precursor signal—which since then hasborne his name—that precedes electromagnetic wavespropagated in a dispersive environment. Back in Francehe started to work on his thesis, with the project ofbuilding a solid state equation somewhat similar, formatter, to the famous relationship between pressure,volume and temperature in gasses. But this difficult work,which led him to clarify the notion of “radiationpressure”, was soon interrupted by the outbreak of thewar in 1914. Léon Brillouin was assigned to theLaboratoire Central de Radio-télégraphie under theauthority of the (future) General Ferrié. In that context heinvestigated undulatory problems from a more concreteangle, through antennae studies, radio-piloting and

scrambling, which earned him the Legion of Honour.

After the war he resumed his research on solids. Byanalysing the interaction between an incidental light waveand vibration waves in a solid, he made his most originaldiscovery: the prediction—which preceded its experimentalverification by nearly ten years—of a subtle couplingbetween the two types of wave, and the fact that thisproduced an exchange of energy and thus of wavelengthfor the light escaping from the solid.

The Brillouin effect was to traverse the century, triggeringincreased interest from the 1960s when lasers becamecommon features in laboratories and made it possible toamplify measurements. Even today, it is still an essential toolfor highly accurate analysis of the elastic properties of solids.

With the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, LéonBrillouin contributed to various aspects of the new theory,including magnetism, where the “Brillouin functions”enhanced the classical “Langevin function”. In parallel healso developed a famous method of approximation knownby the names of Brillouin, Wentzel and Kramers.

It was likewise in the field of wave propagation that LéonBrillouin signed another famous study. He was seeking todescribe the behaviour of the wave, that is now associatedwith any material particle, and in particular with theelectron, when it interacts with the periodic arrangementsof atoms in crystals. Brillouin worked in so-called“reciprocal” space, where a vector represents a wave fillingthe entire space of the crystal. He showed how to dividethis space into planes forming a set of “Brillouin zones”,thus making it possible to unambiguously identify all thewaves, the planes themselves corresponding to those waveswhose propagation is impossible in the crystal. This workpaved the way to modern solid state physics and inparticular to understanding the differences betweenisolating and conducting materials.

Léon BRILLOUINFROM WAVES TO INFORMATION

by Rémy Mosseri© AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives


At that stage, in 1930, Léon Brillouin was the first physicsprofessor of the brand new Institut Henri Poincaré, fromwhich he resigned two years later to join the Collège deFrance. He was at the height of his scientific career and hisreputation stretched way beyond the French community.The effect that he had predicted several years earlier hadclearly been observed in liquids and solids—anachievement that he hoped would be recognized by theNobel jury but never was.

His research in the 1930s at the Collège primarilyconcerned what is known as the quantum N-bodyproblem, and is too technical to summarize here. But healso opened his seminars to concrete problems (such asacoustics) and pluridisciplinary ones, and started todevelop a growing taste for epistemological questions.

As the spectre of global conflict loomed once again,political decisions were taken concerning radiobroadcasting, with a view to creating a powerful andeffective tool. In July 1939 Léon Brillouin was appointedhead of radio broadcasting, with the prime objective ofreducing France’s technological backwardness incomparison with Germany, and above all equipping thecountry with powerful short-wave transmitters, which itlacked. During France’s disastrous defeat of May-June1940 he gave the order to destroy all the transmittersbefore they fell into enemy hands. He then joined thecomplex operation headed by biologist Louis Rapkine,which enabled tens of scientists to leave France for theUnited States during the first two years of the war. Thiswas how Léon Brillouin arrived in New York in May1941. He became a member of the Free French Forces andrapidly sought to participate in the US war effort, rightlybelieving that his recent research on magnetron theorywould interest the engineers feverishly developing the

radars that would contribute so much to the Allies’supremacy. His participation was officially recognized bythe US authorities, albeit at a late stage.

After the Liberation his return to France turned out to besomewhat complicated. Did he feel that there was littleenthusiasm to have him back in Paris, or did he want toremain in the US because he sensed the tremendousscientific interest of the first generation of computers thathe saw being developed at Harvard? He postponed hisreturn, content to make short visits to resume his lecturesat the Collège de France where he was eagerly awaited,especially by those who, cut off from scientific progressunder the occupation, aspired to rapidly catching up. Butthe Collège rules prohibited this intermittent presence, andLéon Brillouin finally chose to remain in the United Statesand even to adopt US nationality in 1949. He already hada place of choice among the American scientific elite,sanctioned by his election to the National Academy ofSciences in 1953.

In the immediate post-WWII years he developed a passionfor the new Information theory spawned by the work ofShannon and Weaver. His book Science and Theory ofInformation made Léon Brillouin one of the main vehiclesof the success of this theory. In it he tackled the oldproblem of Maxwell’s demon which continued toundermine the bases of thermodynamics, and even thoughtthat he had solved it, concluding that “the demon is oldnow and it is time to retire it”. But his argumentation,apparently very sound, was nevertheless refuted somethirty years later by Charles Bennet.

It is difficult not to conclude that by returning to France,Brillouin would surely have made a valuable contributionon the country’s scientific scene. Merely listing some of hislast centres of interest, such as non-linear physics andbiophysics, unambiguously places him in the flow ofscience in the making. In certain respects, he even seems tohave been a visionary. And there seems little doubt that hispassion for the philosophy of science would have led himto involve himself more forcefully in France (as he wasalready doing from the United States) in debates at thefrontiers and interfaces between disciplines. That is an areawhere, even more so than within the various fields, themigration of concepts requires a scholarly combination ofopenness and rigour—qualities that Léon Brillouinembodied so well. �

Rémy MosseriSenior Researcher, CNRS

Pierre and Marie Curie University

Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, Brussels,October 1927.1. Léon Brillouin© Benjamin Couprie, International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry

1

Further reading:Rémy Mosseri,Léon Brillouin, à la croisée des ondes,Éditions Belin, Paris 1999.


INSTITUTIONAL

NEWS

THE GENERAL LIBRARY OF

THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCEby Marie-Renée Cazabon

Curator

The libraries of the Collège de France, including the specializedcollections on the Near East, the Far East, Byzantium andEgyptology, are amongst the richest and most beautiful librariesin Europe. Their core components, the General Library and theArchives, have now been moved back to the Marcelin-Berthelotcampus. Two thousand square metres of space have beenentirely renovated and are now ready to receive French andforeign researchers in the best possible conditions (access to thenetwork, large catalogues and databases, and eventually remoteconsultation of digitized volumes).

This is all coordinated by the Library and Archive Services, thepurpose of which is to:� Ensure coordination with all Collège de France libraries,including:- expert advice in library science, standardization andunification of professional procedures, including in the domainof archives;- centralization of the acquisition, subscription and bindingmarkets;- centralization of inter-library loans (ILL), and pooling ofresources;- development of partnerships with libraries from outside theCollège de France.� Connect all these libraries through a single computerizedmanagement system: ALEPH. This is an integrated librarymanagement system (ILMS) funded through patronage, which

will unite all the different catalogues of the specialized librariesand of the General Library in a single catalogue. It willmoreover be enhanced with current tools for networkedresearch of online documents, using the library portal.� Join the national dynamic in this domain: for instance, theGeneral Library of the Collège de France and the specializedlibraries currently take part in the main unifying highereducation projects, SUDOC (système universitaire dedocumentation—university library system), and will eventuallyparticipate in CALAMES (catalogue en ligne des archives et desmanuscrits de l’enseignement supérieur—online catalogue forhigher education archives and manuscripts).� Host researchers: the new space will allow for researchersto be hosted far more comfortably and for three essentialfunctions to be developed:- memory function: collecting, identifying, preserving anddisseminating publications by and about the professors andtheir teachings, and about the history of the Collège de France,regardless of the format;- interdisciplinary function: updating and making availablework tools of interest to several Chairs or several groups ofChairs;- external function: extending the use of its resources beyondits own teams (hosting foreign researchers or researchers frompartner institutions, searching for and providing material usingthe ILL system, accessing external resources using the libraryportal).

Library and Archive Services

With both scientific and economic objectives in mind,the specialized libraries and the General Library of theCollège de France have developed ties, confirmed insome cases by agreements, with various partners: theBibliothèque Universitaire des Langues et Civilisations(BULAC—university library of languages andcivilizations); the École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm;the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations

Orientales (INALCO—national institute of orientallanguages and civilizations); the Bibliothèque Inter-universitaire de Médecine (BIUM—inter-universitymedical library); the Institut Mémoire de l’EditionContemporaine (IMEC—institute for the memory ofcontemporary publishing); the Institut de Recherche etd’Histoire des Textes (IRHT—institute for textualresearch and history) of the CNRS.

Collaboration and partnerships


Thanks to patronages, particularly that of Mr MichelDavid-Weill, the library service has developed andimplemented a common tool for all the libraries: a singlecatalogue allowing access from anywhere to all of thebibliographical descriptions of the collections available inthe various libraries of the Collège de France. The differentcatalogues of the libraries have been uploaded to anintegrated library management system (ILMS) known asALEPH. Apart from the possibility of searching for thedescription of a publication as in any catalogue, thenumerous resources offered by this system make it a verypowerful reference tool.

ALEPH is used in a large number of higher educationlibraries in France. It applies the most recent library scienceand computing standards, as well as the essentialfunctionalities required of a catalogue. ALEPH moreoverincludes the Unicode standard which allows for the originallanguage and edition of publications to be catalogued. It ofcourse also offers the possibility of networking andexchanging data with the SUDOC (collective catalogue ofthe higher education and research libraries).

Users have access to an electronic resource portal organizedand catalogued by the libraries of the Collège de France.The portal offers a complete display of the informationsources offered by the institution’s libraries.

For each item, users can choose the services offered by thelibraries such as, for instance, access to the full text. Apersonal page with a basket, a list of favourite resources,automatic alert management and a history of searches isoffered to any authenticated user.

For computer searches, users are offered a number ofservices and links that allow them, when consultingbibliographical references, to access complementaryinformation systems. Another application concerns themanagement of digital collections. It includes functionalitiesspecifically dedicated to the conservation of digitaldocuments and to managing the registration of copyrightsand digital material. This application offers the guarantee oflong-term access to this material and uses technologiesincluded in ALEPH to catalogue and index the data. �

The computerization of the libraries

The General and Scientific LibraryLocated in new premises, Place Marcelin-Berthelot, theGeneral and Scientific Library has a collection of some120,000 publications (sciences of Antiquity, literature,history, history of art, various specialized collections,scientific publications) and a very wide range of scientificperiodicals that can be accessed freely.Its main aims are to preserve the publications of theProfessors and some of their archives, as well as thewritten and audiovisual archives of the institution, toprovide a bibliographical search tool, and to manageelectronic resources. The reading hall has 58 seats and sixcarrels.

The Oriental librariesThe Oriental Institutes are situated at 52 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, and count five libraries and research units(Institutes of Egyptology, of the Far East, of the AncientNear East, of Byzantine Studies, and of Arabic, Turkishand Islamic Studies). Each institute is directly managedby a Professor, when there is one in the relevant discipline,assisted by a scientific committee that is representative ofall researchers in the field. The committee members are

nominated for three years by the Assembly of Professorsof the Collège de France upon recommendation by theAdministrator of the Collège de France. Some institutespublish collections and have scientific archives which areopen to researchers, except when research on thecollections themselves is ongoing or planned. Theinstitutes work closely with research teams that haveaccess there to study and group meeting areas.

The Institutes of the Far East offer access to the very richmaterial of the library of the Société Asiatique (AsianSociety), when these are not otherwise accessible due toa shortage of staff. The loan of books from the SociétéAsiatique and consultation of its archives is for membersonly.

The Social Anthropology LibraryThe Social Anthropology Library is one of the threereference libraries in the Paris area for anthropology. Itworks closely with the CNRS and the École des HautesÉtudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studiesin Social Science).


THE LETTER OF THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE - N° 556

PARIS SCIENCE ET LETTRES - Quartier LatinPARIS SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES–Latin Quarter

The grouping together of fiveinstitutions to form a campus ofinternational renown, at the heart of theLatin Quarter, contributes to enhancingthe visibility and appeal of Frenchlearning and research.The aim of Paris Sciences et Lettres -Quartier Latin is to:� ensure that the Latin Quarterremains an exceptional site of highereducation and research,by coordinatinginvestments in real estate and inliterature and digital equipment;� increase synergies and the pooling ofteaching and research activities, bydeveloping multidisciplinary activitiesand interfaces, and by working oncommon research projects;� undertake strategic reflection on andadopt a common long-term approach toemerging themes;� enhance France’s internationalvisibility and appeal by creating Chairsof excellence, organizing calls forproposals for post-doctoral researchersand young teams, and implementingsystems for hosting researchers andsupporting international mobility.

The Paris Science and Humanities groupis made up of institutions which, forcenturies, have consistently contributedto the advancement of French scienceand humanities: the École NormaleSupérieure, the Collège de France, theObservatoire de Paris, the ÉcoleSupérieure de Physique et de ChimieIndustrielles de la ville deParis–ParisTech, and the ÉcoleNationale Supérieure de Chimie deParis–ParisTech. Together on theMontagne Sainte-Genevieve, theseinstitutions form a continuum of highereducation and research that covers allacademic disciplines (from classicalhumanities to most innovative sciences).

This grouping is defined by a commoncommitment to achieving very high

quality research, based on a method oflearning through research that is uniquein our country.

Selection is in fact a founding rule, andtop-level training and research are thesole objectives. These two values areessential to performing research andprovide a sound guarantee of thisgroup’s ability to rank among the bestresearch centres in France.

The motto of Paris Sciences et Lettres,“Let us share what makes us unique”,is fully meaningful here.The ambition of Paris Sciences etLettres is to create, on the MontagneSainte-Geneviève and in thesurrounding area, an urban campuspromoting the free movement ofstudents and researchers. PrestigiousChairs, research units, and the hostingof international researchers, post-doctoral researchers and students willbe shared on this campus, which willbe concretely embedded in the urbanfabric through “researchers’

journeys”, as illustrated on the mapbelow.

Paris Sciences et Lettres will also have apolicy of social and societal openness,especially through the dissemination ofknowledge via a digital campusaccessible to all.

Within the framework of OperationCampus, Paris Sciences et Lettres hasapplied for the financial supportessential to achieve its objectives. Thelegal status of Foundation for ScientificCooperation was chosen to ensuretight-knit, reactive and collegialgovernance that will respect theidentity of each institution. Thestatutes have been registered at theMinistry of Higher Education andResearch. The Foundation is governedby a scientific steering committee and a16-member board of governorschaired by a distinguished scientificpersonality, a select steering committee,and a general delegate for itsmanagement. �

N° 5 - THE LETTER OF THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE 57

SURVEY

Since its creation in 1530, 691professors have taught at the Collègede France, and 42 have held AnnualChairs. We know their names, theirspecialties, their age when they werefirst appointed to the chair, theperiod of time for which they taught,etc (1). But what of the people whoattended their lectures? One of theCollège’s fundamental rules beingfreedom of access to all teaching,without any prior registration norexaminations, no information isavailable on this population. We

know only from memory and byobserving the entry into the lectures,that certain lecture halls aresometimes overflowing, forcing us toturn down certain attendees or tooffer them the possibility offollowing a video broadcast inanother room. In order to know alittle more—and to our knowledge,for the first time—a survey wasundertaken at the beginning of 2010,focused on the people who attendedthe lectures delivered during theobservation period.

This survey was designed tosupplement another one on a newaudience category: users of theaudio and video recordings thathave been available for the pastthree years on the Collège’s website.Our findings show that thispopulation differs noticeably fromthe one present in the lecture halls,and substantially increases overallaudience figures. The following is acomparative presentation of someof the results of both surveys.

The survey at the Collège de France took place from mid-January to mid-February 2010, on all the individuals whoattended one of the 26 courses delivered during that period(out of a total of 47 in 2009–2010). By indirect calculationwe estimate the participation rate at roughly 75%, whichmeans that the 1,973 questionnaires returned arerepresentative of the audiences who attend lectures at theCollège.

The online survey was carried out in two main waves ofthree weeks each, in June 2009 and February 2010 (to covertwo different periods in the year). A total of 9,533exploitable answers were received. Compared to the totalnumber of visits to the website during those same periods,this figure corresponds to a response rate of about 6%,

which is acceptable for a survey of this kind (the real rate ismoreover higher, since the same person may log on severaltimes but answer only once). It is however impossible toknow whether the individuals who agreed to participate inthe survey differ from the overall profile of the populationconcerned as regards its specific characteristics, behavioursand degree of satisfaction.

The survey was carried out by the Cultural Affairs Divisionof the Collège de France, under the supervision of ProfessorHenri Leridon, chair of Sustainable Development-Environment, Energy & Society, and Research DirectorEmeritus at the INED (Institut national d’étudesdémographiques).

Audiences on campus and online: two very different populations

The fact that lectures at the Collègede France are held in the centre ofParis, during regular teaching hours(therefore competing withprofessional or study-relatedactivities) and do not lead to anyformal qualification, stronglydetermines the profile of those whoattend. A total of 95% live in Île-de-France (i.e. Paris andsurrounding areas), 83% are aged55 or over, and 72% are eitherunemployed or retired. This clearly

does not correspond to thecharacteristics of the whole of theFrench population (over the age of15), as the attached graph showswith regard to age distribution, forexample. This difference is howeversmaller in the case of peopleattending lectures in themathematical, physical or naturalsciences, where 43% are 55 orolder, and 48% are unemployed orretired.

Distribution by age of the respondents to the survey onaudiences at the Collège, compared to the distribution inthe French population aged 15 and over (INSEE, 2006).

WHO ARE THE AUDIENCES OF THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE’S LECTURES?

Age

� INSEE � Survey respondents

Within this category, 18% of thelisteners are students or researchers(41% in SMPN lectures - Physical,Mathematical and Natural Sciences,and 9% in SHS - Humanities andSocial Sciences), and the greatmajority said that they attended theselectures primarily for their owninterest and culture (89%). Men andwomen are equally represented. Thecultural level is high: nearly 70%belong to the category of “seniormanagement or higher professionals”,against 10% in the whole of theFrench population.

Those who took part in the onlinestudy are not affected by thegeographical constraint. However, themajority (51%) still do live in Île-de-

France, while 35% live elsewhere inFrance and 14% abroad. Thismajority of inhabitants of Île-de-France within the French audiencehas two explanations. First, the Île-de-France region is home to a highproportion of students, teachers andresearchers (it accounts for 40% ofresearchers in the country). Second,because the Collège de France islocated in Paris, it is not nearly aswell-known in other regions where,before online access to lectures, it wasalmost impossible to take advantageof its teaching (with the noteworthyexception of broadcasts on the radiostation France Culture, and a fewlectures scheduled every year in othercities). The relatively high proportionsof respondents in the provinces andespecially abroad are therefore by nomeans insignificant. In the latter casethe problem of language is anadditional obstacle.

Another difference compared toaudiences on campus in Paris is theage distribution in the Webaudiences. The 55 and over agegroup accounts for only a third,which corresponds to the generalpopulation, while the rest of thedistribution differs from the Frenchpopulation as a whole only in so faras there is a smaller proportion of

people in the 15–24 age-group(which is hardly surprising) and alarger proportion in the 25–34 age-group. The latter finding can beascribed to the interest shown bystudents, teachers and researchers.Here this group accounts for 43%of the total, against 18% of theaudiences of lectures on campus,and unemployed/retired personsaccount for only 23%, against 72%(see Table below).

Within this population, which ismore representative of what can beconsidered as the Collège’s natural“target”, 25% of respondents saidthat they listened to lectures as partof their study, research or teachingactivities. Note that 66% of theseaudiences are men (2).

Finally, social bias is less marked inWeb audiences: 46% are in the seniormanagement/higher professionalcategory, against 70% of theaudiences at the Collège. Note alsothat the online questionnaire did notcontain questions on the type oflecture listened to (by discipline).

Occupational situation of respondents to the survey on campus(by disciplinary field) and the online survey.

Roughly two thirds of the survey respondentsuse the website for their personal interest, andthe remaining 35% visit it either for professionalpurposes (10%) or for research (25%).

Reasons given by the web site users

Sector affiliation

Education, Research

Student

No occupation, retired

Other (working)

Amphitheater survey

SHS SMPN TogetherHumanities and Physics, Mathematics

Social Sciences and Natural Science

5% 29% 11%

4% 12% 7%

81% 48% 72%

10% 11% 10%

Internet survey

25%

18%

23%

34%


Some findings on Web audiences’ practices

Although the online offer is fairlyrecent, a large proportion of theaudiences are already regularlisteners: 20% of the respondentsfirst visited the website at least threeyears previously, and 33% firstvisited it between one and threeyears previously. Just under 23%said they visited the website at leastonce a week, and 32% at least oncea month. In contrast, another partof the population is either new (onequarter first visited the site less thanthree months earlier) or occasional(34% log on no more than once ortwice every quarter).

It is noteworthy that Web audiencesare interested in all types of media:44% said they download texts,43% download audio files, and33% download video files (multipleanswers are of course possible).These proportions reflect roughlythose of the various types of

document available online. Onaverage, each Internet user haddownloaded 5 documents over theprevious 12 months. “Heavy users”(at least 15 files downloaded peryear) account for 14% of all thosewho downloaded at least once. Themain mode of listening is oncomputer (80%), either online orafter downloading the file. Mobiledevices follow, at 17%. Thismedium is preferred by youngeraudiences: 23% in the under-35 agegroup. Few Internet users (19%)said they use podcasts, which wouldenable them to download audio orvideo files in a format that can beused on a mobile device. In contrast,a majority of heavy users subscribeto podcasts (54%).

There are some points in commonbetween these two types of audienceof Collège de France lectures (oncampus and distance). In the latter

category, 18% heard about thispossibility when they attendedlectures at the Collège, and the sameproportion by listening to lecturesbroadcast on the radio stationFrance Culture (30% of listeners inthe provinces). Moreover, 33% ofthe respondents who attendedlectures on campus said they alsolistened to lectures on the website,15% said they also listened to audiopodcasts, and 13% to videorecordings. Within that category,22% also listened to lecturesbroadcast on France Culture.

Finally, on the whole therespondents said they were verysatisfied with the content of thelectures and with the technicalconditions of access to material onthe website.

To conclude

1. A demographic analysis will be presented in a later issue of the Letter.2. We also made comparisons with the entire French population who has Internet access. In 2008, 61% of French households had Internet access at home(58% of whom had a high-speed connection). We found that the proportion of individuals aged 55 and over is lower in the population of Internet users (17%against 33% in our survey), and that women are in the minority.

The online offer has substantiallyincreased the size and compositionof the population that can benefitfrom Collège de France lectures.New beneficiaries are on the wholemuch younger and usually visit the

website for teaching or researchpurposes. An obvious obstacle tobetter international dissemination islanguage: for the moment only aminority of lectures and seminarsare available in English. It would

certainly make a significantdifference to the Collège de France’srenown and reputation if this offercould be expanded. �

Professor Henri Leridon

SHS = Humanities and Social Sciences SMPN = Physics, Mathematics and Natural Science

Education, students,research

General knowledge

* (possible double quotes)

Amphitheater survey*

SHS SMPN Together

8% 38% 16%

95% 71% 89%

Web survey

25%

63%

Main motivation for listening to the lectures, of respondents to the survey on campus(according to disciplinary field) and respondents to the online survey


FACTS AND

DATA

COLLÈGE DE FRANCE ORGANIZATION CHART

Administrator of the Collège de France: Pierre CORVOLThe Administrator is a Collège de France professor elected by his/her colleagues to direct the institution for 3 years.

Professors of the Collège de France

I – MATHEMATICAL, PHYSICAL AND NATURAL SCIENCES Mathematics� Analysis and Geometry — Alain CONNES� Partial Differential Equations and Applications — Pierre-Louis LIONS� Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems — Jean-Christophe YOCCOZ� Number Theory — Don ZAGIERPhysics� Mesoscopic Physics — Michel DEVORET� Physics of Condensed Matter — Antoine GEORGES� Quantum Physics — Serge HAROCHE � Observational Astrophysics — Antoine LABEYRIE� Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology — Gabriele VENEZIANONatural sciences � Biology and Genetics of Development — Spyros ARTAVANIS-TSAKONAS� Climate and Ocean Evolution — Édouard BARD� Human Paleontology — Michel BRUNET� Experimental Medicine — Pierre CORVOL� Experimental Cognitive Psychology — Stanislas DEHAENE� Chemistry of biological processes — Marc FONTECAVE� Molecular Immunology — Philippe KOURILSKY� Human Genetics — Jean-Louis MANDEL� Genetics and Cellular Physiology — Christine PETIT� Morphogenetic Processes — Alain PROCHIANTZ� Microbiology and infectious diseases — Philippe SANSONETTI

II – HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCESHistorical, Philological, Archaeological Sciences� History and Civilization of the Achaemenid World and of the Empire of Alexander — Pierre BRIANT� Intellectual History of China — Anne CHENG� Modern and Contemporary French Literature: History, Criticism, Theory — Antoine COMPAGNON� Assyriology — Jean-Marie DURAND� History of India and Greater India — Gérard FUSSMAN� Pharaonic Civilization: Archaeology, Philology, History — Nicolas GRIMAL� Indo-Iranian Languages and Religions — Jean KELLENS� Epigraphy and History of the Ancient Greek Cities — Denis KNOEPFLER� Modern Literatures of Neo-Latin Europe — Carlo OSSOLA� History of European Medieval and Modern Art — Roland RECHT� The Hebrew Bible and/in its contexts — Thomas RÖMER� Religion, Institutions and Society in Ancient Rome — John SCHEID� Turkish and Ottoman History — Gilles VEINSTEIN� History of Modern China — Pierre-Etienne WILL� Literatures of Medieval France — Michel ZINKPhilosophy, sociology� Writings and cultures in modern Europe — Roger CHARTIER� Comparative Legal Studies and Internationalization of Law — Mireille DELMAS-MARTY� Anthropology of Nature — Philippe DESCOLA� Rationality and Social Science — Jon ELSTER� Economic Theory and Social Organization — Roger GUESNERIE


� Contemporary Arab History — Henry LAURENS� Modern and Contemporary History of Politics — Pierre ROSANVALLON

III – ANNUAL CHAIRS 2010–2011� Information Technology and Digital Sciences — Martin ABADI� Artistic Creation — Anselm KIEFER� Knowledge against Poverty — Ismail SERAGELDIN� Sustainable Development—Environment, Energy and Society — Jean-Marie TARASCON� Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt — Elias ZERHOUNI

Emeritus Professors of the Collège de France

� Anatole ABRAGAM — Nuclear Magnetism � Maurice AGULHON — Contemporary French History � Etienne-Emile BAULIEU — Bases and Principles of Human Reproduction � Alain BERTHOZ — Physiology of Perception and Action � Georges BLIN — Modern French Literature � Yves BONNEFOY — Comparative Studies of the Poetic Function� Pierre BOULEZ — Invention, Technique and Language in Music � Jacques BOUVERESSE — Philosophy of Language and Knowledge � Pierre CHAMBON — Molecular Genetics � Jean-Pierre CHANGEUX — Cellular Communication � Claude COHEN-TANNOUDJI — Atomic and Molecular Physics � Yves COPPENS — Palaeontology and Prehistory � François-Xavier COQUIN — Modern and Contemporary Russian History � Gilbert DAGRON — Byzantine History and Civilization � Jean DELUMEAU — History of Religious Mentalities� Michael EDWARDS — Literary Creation in English � Anne FAGOT-LARGEAULT — Philosophy of Life Science� Marcel FROISSART — Corpuscular Physics � Marc FUMAROLI — Rhetoric and Society in 16th and 17th century Europe � Jacques GERNET — Social and Intellectual History of China � Jacques GLOWINSKI — Neuropharmacology � Christian GOUDINEAU — National Antiquities � Gilles Gaston GRANGER — Comparative Epistemology � François GROS — Cellular Biochemistry � Jean GUILAINE — European Civilizations in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age � Ian HACKING — Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts � Claude HAGÈGE — Linguistic Theory � Françoise HÉRITIER — Comparative Studies of African Societies � François JACOB — Cellular Genetics � Pierre JOLIOT — Cellular Bioenergetics � Yves LAPORTE — Neurophysiology � Jean LECLANT — Egyptology � Nicole LE DOUARIN — Molecular and Cellular Embryology� Jean-Marie LEHN — Chemistry of Molecular Interactions � Xavier LE PICHON — Geodynamics � Georges LE RIDER — Economic and Monetary History of the Hellenistic Orient � Emmanuel LE ROY LADURIE — History of Modern Civilization � Jacques LIVAGE — Chemistry of Condensed Matter � Edmond MALINVAUD — Economic Analysis � André MIQUEL — Classical Arabic Language and Literature � Philippe NOZIÈRES — Statistical Physics � Jean-Claude PECKER — Theoretical Astrophysics � Armand de RICQLÈS — Historical Biology and Evolutionism� Daniel ROCHE — French History in the Age of the Enlightenment


LECTURES GIVEN BY THE PROFESSORS ABROAD

AUSTRALIA� University of Melbourne

� Stanislas DEHAENE (Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology)The Global Neuronal Workspace Model of Conscious Processing (2 lectures and seminars)

BELGIUM� Free University of Brussels

� Pierre ROSANVALLON (Chair of Modern and Contemporary History of Politics)Democratic equality: History and theory.� Serge HAROCHE (Chair of Quantum Physics)Non-destructive photon measurement: New insights (4 lectures)

CANADA� University of Montreal

� Jean-Marie LEHN (Chair of Chemistry of Molecular Interactions)From Supramolecular Chemistry towards Adaptative Chemistry (4 lectures)

CHAD� University of N’Djamena

� Michel BRUNET (Chair of Human Paleontology)Origin of the Hominids: Abel and Toumaï, two brilliant confirmations of Darwin’s prediction (1871)

CZECH REPUBLIC� Academy of Sciences, Institute of Physiology

� Alain BERTHOZ (Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action)Plasticity and vicariance: The brain as an emulator.

� Charles University, Prague� Antoine COMPAGNON (Chair of Modern and Contemporary French Literature: History,Criticism, Theory)The Future of the French Culture

DENMARK� University of Copenhagen

� Alain BERTHOZ (Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action)Plasticity and vicariance: The brain as an emulator.

GERMANY� University of Bonn (Ernst Robert Curtius chair)Germany

� Jacques BOUVERESSE (Chair of Philosophy of Language and Knowledge)Literature, knowledge and moral philosophy

� Bauhaus-University Weimar� Alain BERTHOZ (Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action)Plasticity and vicariance: The brain as an emulator.

� Jacqueline de ROMILLY — Greece and the Development of Moral and Political Thinking � Jean-Pierre SERRE — Algebra and Geometry � Michel TARDIEU — History of Syncretisms in Late Antiquity � Javier TEIXIDOR — Semitic Antiquities � Jacques THUILLIER — History of Artistic Creation in France � Jacques TITS — Group Theory � Pierre TOUBERT — Occidental History � Paul-Marie VEYNE — History of Rome� Nathan WACHTEL — History and Anthropology of Meso- and South American Societies � Harald WEINRICH — Romance Languages and Literatures


INDIA� Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

� Marc FONTECAVE (Chair of Chemistry of Biological Processes)Biological Chemistry: Enzymes and Metalloenzymes (3 lectures and seminars)

� National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore� Spyros ARTAVANIS-TSAKONAS (Chair of Developmental Biology and Genetics)Tracing Biological thought from Aristotle to the Genome (3 lectures)

ITALY� University of Macerata

� Anne Cheng (Chair of Intellectual History of China)Reception of some European ideas in modern China: the category of philosophy.Reception of some European ideas in modern China: the concept of freedom.

MEXICO� Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

� Philippe DESCOLA (Chair of Anthropology of Nature)Cosmologia y ontologia: un enfoque antropológico. (4 lectures)

SWEDEN� Uppsala University


� Stockholm Brain Institute, Karolinska Institute� Alain BERTHOZ (Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action)Plasticity and vicariance: The brain as an emulator.

SWITZERLAND� École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne - University of Lausanne

� Alain PROCHIANTZ (Chair of Morphogenetic Processes)Transduction proteins (9 seminars)

TAÏWAN� French School of the Far East, Taipei

� Anne Cheng (Chair of Intellectual History of China)Contemporary debates on the relationships between ethics and politics in reference to The GreatLearning—Daxue Confucean studies in France: an overview

UNITED KINGDOM� University of Edinburgh


UNITED STATES� University of Chicago

� Thomas RÖMER (Chair of The Hebrew Bible and/in its Contexts)Israel’s First History (3 lectures)Current Research on the Pentateuch (3 seminars)

� Yale University, New Haven� Michel DEVORET (Chair of Mesoscopic Physics)Introduction to Mesoscopic Physics (3 lectures)


LECTURES AND LECTURE SERIES

BY FOREIGN PROFESSORSINVITED BY THE ASSEMBLY OF THE PROFESSORS

I. State chairs reserved for foreign scholars

� Eliezer RABINOVICI, Professor, Racah Institute of Physics, Jérusalem (Israel), Oct. 20091–2. Black Holes, String Theory and Phases of Gravity3. Black Holes, String Theory and Gravitational Singularities4. Black Holes, String Theory and Information Aspects.

� Stephen MANN, Professor, University of Bristol (Great Britain), Oct. 2009Biomineralization. Principles and Concepts in Bioinorganic Materials Chemistry1. Biominerals—Types and Functions2. General Principles and Chemical Control3. Matrix-mediated Biomineralization4. Morphogenesis an Biomineral Tectonics.

� Tamar FLASH, Professor, Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Rehovot (Israel), Oct. 2009Neural Control of Movement: Principles and Models1. Human Trajectory Planning: Historical Perspectives and Current Research Directions2. From Motion Plans to Motor Execution3. On the Contruction and Perception of Complex Movements4. Motor Learning and Adaptation of Motor Actions.

� Jack SASSON, Professor, Vanderbilt University (USA), Oct.–Nov. 2009Extraits d’un commentaire au livre des juges : quatre lectures sur l’art et les techniquesnarratologiques bibliques :1. Fragments et cohérence : le livre des juges à la lumière des documents mésopotamiens ;2. Otniel et Ehud : l’analyse générique de leurs récits ;3. Les deux mères de Sisera et le poème didactique de Déborah ;4. Jephté : portrait d’un héros manqué.

� Christian LETZ, Professor, University of Tübingen (Germany), Nov. 20091. Le grand Hymne athribite des noms de la déesse Répit2. Le défilé des dieux des provinces à Dendara, Philae et Athribis3. La décoration du temple de kom Ombo et la fonction de ses divers éléments.

� Mark GARRISON, Professor, University of San-Antonio (USA), Nov. 2009New Light on Persepolis: The Glyptic Imagery from the persepolis Fortification and Treasury Archives1. Seals and Archives at Persepolis: an introduction2. Glyptic Imagery as Social Identity: The Seals of Zissawis3. The Religous Landscape at Persepolis: New Glyptic Evidence for the So-Called « Fire Altars »4. Glyptic imagery and Ideology: The Emergence of a Visual Language of Empire at Persepolis.

� Isabelle PERETZ, Professor, University of Montreal (Canada), Nov.–Dec. 2009Cognitive Neuroscience of music.

� Roger HEACOCK, Professor, Birzeit University (Palestine), Nov. 2009La Palestine, un kaleidoscope disciplinaire1. Palestine et histoire : le temps perdu2. Palestine et espace : le territoire éclaté3. Palestine et identité : la société résistante4. Palestine et discours : la perspective implosée.


� Lodovica BRAIDA, Professor, University of Milano (Italy), Nov.–Dec. 2009Pour une histoire de la culture écrite en Italie (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)1. Les lettres en typographie. Inquiétudes religieuses et modèles linguistiques dans les manuelsépistolaires du XVIe siècle2. Les livres de lettres à l’Index. Censure et autocensure3. Les genres de large circulation. Textes, formes et usages des livres4. L’auteur absent. La réflexion sur la propriété littéraire au XVIIIe siècle.

� Yoshihito NAKAMURA, Professor, Tokyo University (Japan), Nov.–Dec. 2009Challenges in Humanoid Robotics1. Toward Humanoid Robots Accumulating Human Behaviors;2. Toward Humanoid Robots Understanding Human Sensation3. Toward Humanoid Robots Communicating with Humans.

� Souleymane Bachir DIAGNE, Professor, Columbia University (USA), Dec. 2009–Jan. 20101. Bergson et la pensée de L. S. Senghor2. L.S. Senghor et la philosophie du socialisme africain3. Bergson et la philosophie iqbalienne de l’ijtihad4. Leibniz, Bergson, iqbal et le Fatum mahometanum.

� Daniel HELLER ROAZEN, Professor, Princeton University (USA), Jan. 2010Harmonies et disharmonies du monde. Le son, le mètre et le nombre, de Pythagore à Nicole Oresme1. Dans la forge. L’invention de la consonance2. De l’arithmétique à l’art rythmique3. « Musique naturelle » et langues vulgaires4. Brisures du cosmos.

� Itzhak FRIED, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles (USA) and University of Tel-Aviv (Israel),Feb. 20101. Matter and Memory: Stimulation and Recordings in the Human Temporal Lobe2. Matter and Memory: Single Neurons and Human Recollections3. Neuronal Mechanisms of Will and Action: Stimulation and Single Neuron Recordings in theHuman Frontal Lobe4. Surgery of Epileptogenic and Functional Brain Networks: Plasticity and Functional Recovery.

� Jörg RÜPKE, Professor, University of Erfurt (Germany), Feb.–March 20101. Les déviances religieuses : concepts romains et modernes2. Les superstitions : expériences religieuses interdites dans les temples3. Le discours normatif de l’Antiquité tardive4. L’individualisation religieuse dans le monde gréco-romain.

� Clifford ANDO, Professor, University of Chicago (USA), March 2010L’empire du droit.

� Detlev GANTEN, Professor, La Charité University Clinic, Berlin (Germany), Mar.–June 20101. The New Concept of Evolutionary Medicine2. Evolutionary Medicine: What Can we Learn for the Prevention and Treatment of Disease?3. The Evolution of Cardiovascular Diseases: Practical Lessons Learned4. Evolutionary Medicine—the Evolution of Medicine and Education.

� John E. JACKSON, Professor, University of Berne (Switzerland), Mar.–Apr. 2010Paul Celan : contre-parole et absolu poétique1. La contre-parole2. Le principe dialogique3. La poétique de la « Strette »4. Le tournant des dernières années.


� Marc TESSIER-LAVIGNE, Executive Vice-President of Research and Chief Scientific officer of GenentechInc., California (USA), Mar.–Apr. 2010Development, Degeneration and Regeneration of Neuronal Circuits.

� Markus ANTONIETTI, Professor, University of Postdam (Germany), Director of the Max-Planck-Instituteof Colloids and Interface, May 20101. Materials Chemistry in the Energy and Raw Material Change2. Template Processes: Material Science Tool, Analysis of Self-Organization or Just Art3. Hydrothermal Carbonization: A « chimie douce » Towards Carbon Structures and Carbon-negativeProduct Styles4. Carbon Nitrides and Metal Nitrides: Towards Artificial Photosynthesis.

� Susan TAYLOR, Professor, University of California, San Diego (USA), May 2010Camp-dependent Protein Kinase and the Regulation of Cell Signaling by Protein Phosphorylation1. Protein Kinase Structure and Function2. Allosteric Regulation of PKA by cAMP3. Assembly of Tetrameric Holoenzymes4. Signaling in Time and Space: Localizing PKA to Macromolecular Signaling Complexes.

� Lawrence WARD, Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada), May 20101. Neural Synchronisation and Cognition2. Neural Synchronisation and Attention3. Neural Synchronisation and Consciousness4. Role of the thalamus in Human consciousness.

� Marianne BRONNER-FRASER, Professor, California Institute of Technology (USA), May 20101. Gene Regulatory Network Underlying Neural Crest Formation2. Evolution of the neural crest From a gene regulatory perspective3. Ectodermal Placodes and their Contribution to the peripheral Nervous System4. Analysis of Cranofacial Developement using a Novel Gene/Protein trap Strategy.

� Peter STALLYBRASS, Professor, University of Pennsylvania (USA), May 20101. Shakespeare’s Desk2. Shakespeare n’a jamais écrit un livre3. Authorship, Attribution and Anonimity4. Montaigne, Shakespeare et le suicide.

� Oliver Jens SCHMITT, Professor, University of Vienna (Austria), May 2010Entre Venise et les TurcsI) Le miroir de la présence vénitienne en Méditerranée orientale : le cas de l’île de Korcula.1. Le pouvoir ; 2. Les hommes et la terre ; 3. La mer.II) Skanderbeg et le sultan : Anatomie d’une rébellion contre l’Empire ottoman.

� Douglas HOFSTADTER, Professor, Indiana University (USA), May–June 2010La centralité de l’analogie dans le monde de l’esprit1. L’analogie au cœur de la cognition2. Les analogies extraordinaires d’Albert Einstein3. Le rôle omniprésent des analogies dans la traduction4. La place d’honneur de l’analogie dans la traduction de la poésie.

� Christopher BEARD, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh (USA), May–June 20101. Primate Origins: A New Synthesis Based on Data from the Fossil Record and MammalianGenomics2. Global Warming in the Beginning of the « Age of Mammals »3. The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkey, Apes and Humans4. Burmese Days: Primate Paleontology in the union of Myanmar.


� Benjamin FOSTER, Professor, Yale University (USA), June 20101. De la mer supérieure à la mer inférieure : l’avènement et la chute de l’empire d’Akkad2. Pays et peuples d’Akkad3. Les travaux et les jours akkadiens4. L’élu des dieux.

II. Others Invitations

� John NORTH, Professor, University College of London (Great Britain), Nov. 2009Pompeius Festus et l’origine du dictionnaire latin.

� Betsy JOLAS, Honorary Professor, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, Nov. 2009Je chante ce que je dis ; je dis ce que je chante.

� Juan CALATRAVA, Director, School of Architecture of Granada (Spain), Nov.–Dec. 2009Le Corbusier :1. « Il n’y a pas d’architectes seuls… » Le Corbusier et la synthèse des arts2. Le poème de l’Angle Droit.

� Hans Ulrich GUMBRECHT, Professor, Stanford University (USA), March 20101. Peut-on éviter Heidegger ?2. Pourquoi on n’a pas oublié Heidegger.

� Guillemette BOLENS, Professor, University of Geneva (Switzerland), March 2010Les gestes et la perception du mouvement dans l’art et la littérature.

� Andrée HAYUM, Professor, Fordham University (USA), March 20101. L’idée de la Renaissance à l’aube du musée européen : les écoles primitives2. The Migration of the Renaissance Primitives and the Early Public Museum in the Anglo-AmericanWorld.

� Antoine TOUZE, Assistant Professor, Paris 13 University, March–April 2010Invariants, cohomologie et représentations fonctorielles des groupes algébriques.

� Oded LIPSCHITS, Professor, University of Tel Aviv (Israel), April 2010How did the Babylonian Empire Rule in Judah? First Clues for Babylonian Administration in the« Empty Land ».

� Thomas LECUIT, Directeur de Recherche, CNRS, Institut de Biologie du développement de MarseilleLuminy, CNRS/Université de la Méditerranée, May 2010Contrôle génétique et contraintes physiques au cours de la morphogenèse.

� Laurent DUBOIS, Professor, Duke University, Durham, (USA), May 2010Des lumières enchaînées : la révolution haïtienne et la pensée politique des esclaves.

� Arthur GOLDHAMMER, Professor, Harvard University (USA), May 2010De la démocratie en américain : traduire Tocqueville.

� Martin HELLWIG, Professor, Max-Planck-Institute, Bonn (Germany), May 2010Crise financière et réglementation bancaire.

� Noam CHOMSKY, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), May 2010Interpretation and understanding: language and beyond.

� Edward SLINGERLAND, Professor, Asian Centre, Vancouver (Canada), June 2010Reverse Orientalism and the Figure of Confucius in the west.


� Stephen F. TEISER, Professor, Princeton University (USA), June 2010Healing with merit: Buddhist Rituals of Curing in Medieval Chinese Liturgical Manuscripts1. Logic and Language2. Codicology and Sociology.

� Yordan PEEV, Professor, Sofia University (Bulgaria), June 2010La porosité entre l’islam et le christianisme dans les Balkans. Le cas du crypto-christianisme.

� Leonard GUARENTE, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), June 2010Sirtuins, Aging and Disease.

� Sir Geoffrey LLOYD, Professor, Cambridge University (Great Britain), June 20101. La fabrique des disciplines2. Pour un réexamen des sciences dans les sociétés anciennes : Grèce, Chine, Mésopotamie.

� Jayant NARLIKAR, Professor, University of Pune (India), June 2010A Search for Micro-organisms in the Earth Atmosphere.

� Gregory SCHOPEN, Professor, University of Californie, Los Angeles (USA), June 2010On Early Buddhist Monks and Nuns Protecting Children from Death and Demon for a Fee.


EVENTS AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE 2009–2010

September� Atoms, Cavities and Photons (Chair of QuantumPhysics)� The Sensual City (preparation for the Shanghai2010 World Expo, Jacques Ferrier ArchitecturesAgency)� Translational Research in Alzheimer (FranceAlzheimer Association)� Launching of the IbiSA NGS network (Génoscopeand Institut de Génomique)

October� Contemporary Lebanon (Lebanese JuristsAssociation)� Rhetoric and Arts (International Society for theHistory of Rhetoric)� Darwin’s Bicentenary (Collège de France AutumnSymposium 2009)� Grotowski, the stage, France, and Counterculture(UNESCO and Paris-Sorbonne 4 University)

November� Launching of the event « À l’école des écrivains »(Ministry of National Education)� Open days of the Collège de France BiologyInstitute� The Republic of Letters in Turmoil (Chair ofModern and Contemporary French Literature:History, Criticism, Theory and Chair of Rhetoricand Society in 16th and 17th century Europe)

December� Dante at the Collège de France (Chair of ModernLiteratures of Neo-Latin Europe)� The Technion takes up the Challenge of Growththrough Innovation (Technion Israel Institute ofTechnology, Technion France Association)� Humanoids 09, 9th International conference onhumanoid robots (Chair of Physiology of Perceptionand Action)

January� Jean Dausset Days (Chair of Experimental Medicine)

March� French and Turks in the Ottoman Era. FiveCenturies of Relationships (Chair of Turkish andOttoman History)

April� The Langages of Research in Human and SocialSciences (CNRS—Unité au service de la recherchedes UMIFRE)

� Annual Colloquium of the Union rationaliste(Chair of History of India and Greater India)

May� Billionaire Africa: Challenges and Opportunitiesof the African Metamosphosis (Agence française dedéveloppement)� Five Years of Agence nationale de la recherche(ANR—National Research Agency)� Rationality, Truth and Democracy: BertrandRussell, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky (Chair ofPhilosophy of Language and Knowledge)

June� Frontiers in Neuromorphic Computation (Unitéde Neurosciences, CNRS)� Managing Climate Change (Chair of EconomicTheory and Social Organization and Chair ofSustainable Development - Environment, Energyand Society)� Archéo-Nil 1990–2010, 20 Years of PredynasticResearch (Archéo-Nil Society)� Le Monde-La Recherche Forum (Le MondeNewspaper and La Recherche Magazine)� Insights on Vertebrate Evolution: Topics andIssues (Chair of Historical Biology andEvolutionism)� The Unexpected Anthology (Chair of ArtisticCreation)� Fault and Punishment (Chair of Assyriology andChair of The Hebrew Bible and/in its contexts)� Nanotechnology in Medicine (Multi-OrganismsThematic Institute (ITMO) and Chair ofTechnological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt)� ITMO Neuroscience, Cognitive Science,Neurology and Psychiatry (CNRS)

July� Body Development and Relations with Others(Chair of Physiology of Perception and Action andFrench Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry)� String Phenomenology (Chair of ElementaryParticles, Gravitation and Cosmology and ÉcolePolytechnique)


RESEARCH TEAMS HOSTED

The policy of hosting research teams was implementedon the basis of an Assembly vote dated 18 March2001 to contribute towards the training of youngresearch teams and to enhance the Collège’s scientificpotential. In some cases it was a temporary solutionfor teams directed by a professor about to retire.

Space permitting, these teams, which have to obtainthe approval of their parent institution and to receiveon-going funds from it, can be officially hosted by theCollège de France team for a four-year contract,renewable once.

They receive a € 10,000 annual grant and may obtainATER and lecturing posts, on the same basis as thelaboratories of the Chairs.

The final decision to host these teams is taken by theAssembly of Professors, after evaluation by acommission of professors.

Teams currently hosted:

�Lyne BANSAT-BOUDONInstitute for Indian Studies (EA 518)

� Catherine LLORENS-CORTESCentral neuropeptides and the regulation of bodyfluid homeostatis and cardiovascular functions(U 691)� Jean-Michel DENIAU

The dynamics and physiopathology of neuronnetworks (U 667)� Christian GIAUME

Junctional communication and interactionbetween neuronal and glial networks (U840)� Claude RANGIN and Pierre HENRY

EGERIE (Team Geodynamics of ExchangeResearch-Industry-Learning)� TRAN VAN NHIEU GuyIntercellular communication and bacterial infections(U971)� MANACORDA StefanoLaw Team is part of the ARPE (Association derecherches pénales européennes) (UMR 8103 ofcomparative law - University Paris I)

UMR: Unité mixte de recherche(Combined Research Unit)

U: Unité (Unit)

TEMPORARY POSITIONS AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE 2010–2011

(MAÎTRES DE CONFÉRENCES AND ATER)

Temporary positions permit to receive yearly 29 Maîtresde conférences (Assistant Professors) and 38 ATER(Research Assistants and Post-Doctoral positions) inthe chairs and research laboratories at the Collège deFrance.

French 45Foreign 11Nationals of the U.E. 11


THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE INSTITUTES

The Collège de France has four Institutes: Biology; theContemporary World; Literary Studies; and the Far East.These are informal structures with no official status froman administrative point of view. They group togetherChairs and hosted teams. The Institutes are created or closed on the initiative ofthe professors concerned, after a formal decision by theAssembly. They promote and facilitate research by defining commonprojects and by pooling technical staff, equipment(technical facilities, libraries, etc.) and premises.The modalities of these Institutes’ organization may vary.

Institute of Biology

The Collège de France Institute of Biology, created in1983 on a decision of the Assembly of Professors,includes the Collège’s Professors of Biology (whethertheir laboratory is located at the Collège itself orelsewhere) and the teams hosted by the Collège. Theincumbent President is Alain Prochiantz.

Chairs whose laboratories are located at the Instituteof Biology: � Pierre Corvol, Experimental Medicine(Inserm U833)� Alain Prochiantz, Morphogenic Processes

Chairs whose laboratories are not located at theCollège de France: � Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, DevelopmentalBiology and Genetics� Stanislas Dehaene, Experimental CognitivePsychology (Inserm-CEA 562) � Philippe Kourilsky, Molecular Immunology � Jean-Louis Mandel, Human Genetics (InsermU596)� Christine Petit, Genetics and Cell Physiology(Inserm U587)

Hosted teams located within the Institute of Biology(they benefit from all the Institute’s resources): � Laurent Venance, Inserm U667, Dynamics andPathophysiology of Neuronal Networks� Catherine Llorens-Cortes, Inserm U691, Centralneuropeptides and the regulation of body fluids� Christian Giaume, Inserm U840, Junctionalcommunication and interaction between neuronaland glial networks.� Guy Tran Van Nhieu, INSERM U971,Intercellular communication and bacterial infections � Sidney Wiener, CNRS UMR 7152, Physiology ofPerception and Action

Professor Anne Fagot-Largeault (emeritus, chair ofPhilosophy of Life Science), and Professor Armand deRicqlès (emeritus, chair of Historical Biology andEvolutionism), also participate in discussionsconcerning the Collège de France Institute of Biology.

The aim of the Institute is to promote the researchbeing done within the Collège de France, via severalactions defined by the professors of the Institute andapplied by its Coordination Committee.

Shared resources:- animal facilities: conventional and transgenic- technical platforms: confocal imaging and electronmicroscopy, neural imaging- equipment for studying behaviour in rodents- document library

Institute of the Contemporary World

The Institute of the Contemporary World was created in2005.

It groups together six Collège de France Chairs, five ofwhich are located on the Ulm site and one on theCardinal Lemoine site: � Mireille Delmas-Marty, Comparative Legal Studiesand Internationalization of Law� Philippe Descola, Anthropology of Nature� Jon Elster, Rationality and Social Sciences� Roger Guesnerie, Economic Theory and SocialOrganization� Henry Laurens, Contemporary Arab History� Pierre Rosanvallon, Modern and ContemporaryHistory of Politics

The Institute is coordinated by a professor on the basis ofa two-year rotating system. Pierre Rosanvallon is thecurrent coordinator.

The members of the Institute are participating in amulti-disciplinary study on globalization, focused onthe following three dimensions: democracy, the rule oflaw, and the market.

Three key topics are addressed:- Management of global collective (public) goods- National sovereignty in question and the question ofgovernance- Towards a global political society: law and politicsin the constitution of an international order.



Institute of Literary Studies

The Institute of Literary Studies combines the Collège deFrance Chairs devoted to literature studies and relatedsubjects (history of art, history of books):

Professors:� Roger Chartier, Writing and cultures in modernEurope� Antoine Compagnon, Modern and contemporaryliterature: history, theory, critique� Carlo Ossola, Modern literatures of neo-latin Europe� Roland Recht, History of european medieval andmodern art� Michel Zink, Literatures of medieval FranceEmeritus Professors:� Yves Bonnefoy, History of the poetic function� Michael Edwards, Literary creation in English� Marc Fumaroli, Rhetoric and society in Europe(16th–17th centuries)� Harald Weinrich, Romance languages andliteratures.

Michel Zink is currently the Director of the Institute ofLiterary Studies.

Ms. Odile Bombarde, senior lecturer associated with thechair of Professor Michel Zink, coordinates the Institute’sactivities.

On the initiative of one or another of its professors, theInstitute organizes colloquia devoted to topics forreflection common to the various comprising Chairs.Professors from the Institute as well as French and foreignresearchers whom they wish to make partners in theirwork, participate in these meetings. They allow for aconfrontation between fields of thought that are related—literary criticism, history of ideas, art history, poeticcreation—but different, owing to the periods concernedor the approaches and methods used.

The Institute is closely associated to the works on theHistory of the College de France, a research andpublication project under the responsibility of ProfessorMarc Fumaroli. The first volume was published in 2006.

The Collège de France’s Oriental Institutes

The “Instituts d’Extrême-Orient” (IEO) are afederation of five Institutes devoted to Chinese,Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan studiesrespectively. Historically, the Institutes were

C.I.R.B.–Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology


The Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology(CIRB) is a novel Collège de France/CNRS/INSERMresearch structure located at the Collège de France inthe Center of Paris. Nine teams from differenthorizons have recently founded this structure with thespirit to foster new collaborations within biologicaldomains and across the usual disciplinary divide. Inthe long term the nine founding groups, specializedin the fields of infectious diseases, neurosciences andcardio-vascular research, will be rejoined by a similarnumber of new groups, primarily junior groups,including chemists, physicists and mathematicianswith a strong interest for biological sciences. The newCenter will benefit from being in the vicinity ofseveral other laboratories and from an extraordinaryrich intellectual milieu, with conferences that coverall aspects of knowledge. Outside of Collège deFrance, CIRB has developed strong interactions withhigh profile neighboring institutions, in particular theÉcole Normale Supérieure and the Curie Institute. �

The Nine Founding Teams� Dynamics and Pathophysiology of NeuronalNetworksGroup Leaders: Jean-Michel Deniau, Laurent Venance� Molecular Control of Vascular DevelopmentGroup Leader: Anne Eichmann� Role of Matrix Proteins in Hypoxia andAngiogenesisGroup Leader: Stéphane Germain� Junctional Communication and Interactionsbetween Glial and Neuronal NetworksGroup Leader: Christian Giaume� Cell Biology of HomeoproteinsGroup Leader: Alain Joliot� Central Neuropeptides in Cardiovascular andHydric RegulationGroup Leader: Catherine Llorens-Cortes� Early Development and PathologiesGroup Leader: Geneviève Nguyen� Homeoprotein Function in Morphogenesis andPhysiologyGroup Leader: Alain Prochiantz� Intercellular Communication and MicrobialInfections Group Leader: Guy Tran Van Nhieu

� BOOKS

The Collège de France has a partnership with the Éditions Fayard and the Éditions Odile Jacob for publishing theinaugural lectures of the professors, some lectures of invited professors and the proceedings of some of the Collège’scolloquiums.

Éditions Fayard - Collection “Leçons inaugurales”(Inaugural lectures)� Gérard BERRY, Penser, modéliser et maîtriser le calcul informatique (2009), n° 208. � Patrick COUVREUR, Les nanotechnologies peuvent-elles contribuer à traiter des maladies sévères (2010),n° 211. � Marc FONTECAVE, Chimie des processus biologiques : une introduction (2009), n° 207. � Antoine GEORGES, De l’atome au matériau. Les phénomènes quantiques collectifs (2010), n° 209.� Henri LERIDON, De la croissance zéro au développement durable (2009), n° 205.� Peter PIOT, L’épidémie du sida. Mondialisation des risques, transformations de la santé publique etdéveloppement (2010), n° 210. � Thomas RÖMER, Les Cornes de Moïse. Faire entrer la Bible dans l’histoire (2009), n° 206. � Nicholas STERN, Gérer les changements climatiques. Climat, croissance, développement et équité (2010),n° 212.

Éditions Odile Jacob - symposia and conferences� Stanislas DEHAENE et Christine PETIT (eds.), Parole et musique. Aux origines du dialogue humain, 2009. � Pascal GRIENER, La République de l’oeil. L’Expérience de l’art au siècle des Lumières, 2010.� Denis KNOEPFLER, La patrie de Narcisse, 2010.� Pierre MAGISTRETTI et François ANSERMET (eds.), Neurosciences et psychanalyse, 2010. � Alain PROCHIANTZ (ed.), Darwin : 200 ans, 2010.� Michel ZINK (ed.), Livres anciens, lectures vivantes, 2010.

Yearbook� Cours et travaux du Collège de France. Résumés 2008–09. Annuaire 109e année.

� OPEN EDITION/E-BOOKS

Since June 2010, 4 collections of the College de France have been published on Internet (open access): � the Inaugural Lectures� the Yearbook� the Letter of the College de France� the ConferencesThe texts are published in partnership with the CLEO (Center for Open Electronic Publishing). They are availableon the College de France website (http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/pub_elec/index.htm) and onRevues.org (http://www.revues.org), a platform for journals in the humanities and social sciences run by theCLEO.Most texts are in French, some are translated in English (e.g. the inaugural lecture of Nicholas Stern), and somewill be published directly in English (e.g. the conference of Noam Chomsky).Some of these texts are available as e-books on Apple Store and other platforms (inaugural lectures, The Letterof the Collège de France).

� DVDS (Coproduction Collège de France / Docside / Éditions Montparnasse)

� Pierre BOULEZ, 2010.� Pierre-Gilles de GENNES, 2010.� François JACOB, 2010.� Jacqueline de ROMILLY, 2010.

PUBLICATIONS 2009–2010


COLLÈGE DE FRANCE AUTUMN SYMPOSIUM 2010–2011

The globalization of researchCompetition, cooperation, restructuring14–15 October 2010

The ‘campus plan’ and the creation of the PRES (centresfor research and higher education), completing earlierreforms of the universities and the CNRS, triggered anunprecedented concentration of French research. Theaim was to enable it to maintain its leading position in anenvironment of international competition that has nowexpanded to include the large emergent countries.

International competition is not the only driver ofchange. Basic research has undergone upheavals in thepast ten years, leading to the creation of sufficiently largeresearch centres to justify the purchase and very highoperating costs of the increasingly sophisticatedequipment required. All the disciplines are concerned,including the human and social sciences which have beencompletely transformed by the introduction ofcomputing and electronic publications. Heavyequipment, the use of which is now standard practice inbiology and medicine (genome sequencing, imagery,etc.), in physics (Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, etc.)and in astronomy (Hubble space telescope, etc.), isaccessible only to those organizations able to finance itand to commit to using it intensively.

Finding adequate funds is therefore a necessity. Itinvolves both national and international competition, asprivate and government grants go to the most renownedlaboratories. There is nothing fundamentally new aboutthis: research is the other side to discovery, and discoverydemands that one be first. What has changed, apart from

the volume of the financial resources needed today, is theuse of new evaluation criteria: controversial internationalclassifications like those of the University of Shanghai;prizes, some of which, like the Nobel Prize, are grantedyears after the discoveries; quantified evaluations whosedata and tools are challenged.

Competition demands secrecy until the result is sure.The same applies to patents and to contracts with privateindustry, which finance a large part of basic research. Butbeing a researcher implies making one’s results knownas generously and widely as possible. Science has noboundaries. All laboratories, including in the social andhuman sciences, have partnerships or fully-fledgedmembers who are foreigners. Almost all of them use andcontribute to developing tools that will be employedworld-wide , large facilities or electronic databases. Inthese conditions, what does secrecy and internationalcompetition mean? How should the researcher behave?Is there no risk of misuse, ethically speaking?

These are the questions that the opening symposium in2010 is intended to explore. The role played by theCollège de France yesterday and today in research andthe teaching of research, along with the fact that we areourselves confronted with these contradictions, affordsus the possibility and the duty to do so. �

The programme and lectures are available onwww.college-de-france.fr


Programme

Thursday 14 October 2010

� Opening by Pierre Corvol, Administrator of theCollège de France� Introduction by Gérard Fussman, Professor at theCollège de France

2000–2010: Technical, institutional and behaviouralupheavals � The digital revolution in the sciencesGérard Berry, Senior Researcher at INRIA, Professorat the Collège de France (2008–2010)Discussant: Jean-Louis Mandel, Professor at theCollège de France (biocomputing explosion)� Academic research and biotechnology industry Jean-Paul Clozel, C.E.O. of Actelion PharmaceuticalsLtd, Professor at the Collège de France (2007–2008)Discussant: Pierre Joliot, Honorary professor at theCollège de France� The larges facilities of the cognitive sciences andtheir resultsDenis Le Bihan, Senior researcher at CEA, Head andfounder of Neurospin, physicist and Doctor ofMedicine, Professor at the University of KyotoDiscussant: Claudine Tiercelin, Professor ofphilosophy at the University Paris XII, InstitutUniversitaire de France� New means, new funding, new research questions inarcheologyJean-Paul Demoule, Professor of archaeology atUniversity Paris I, former Director of the INRAP(Institut national de recherches archéologiquespréventives)Discussant: Michel Gras, Director of the Écolefrançaise de Rome� New tools and new controversies in demographicsHervé Le Bras, Senior researcher at the EHESSDiscussant: Brigitte Dormont, Professor of Economicsat the University Paris-Dauphine, Head of the chair ofHealth of the Fondation du Risque� Restructuring ‘neighbourhoods’ , building newtownsRoland Castro, urban planner/architectDiscussant: Michel Lussault, Professor of geographyat the ENS-Lyon, Director of the Urban PlanningInstitute at the ENS in Lyon� Research libraries and scientific information.Constance and transformationDaniel Renoult, Dean of the Inspection Générale desbibliothèques Discussant: Roger Chartier, Professor at the Collègede France� Estimating scientific productivity using databases Jacques Mairesse, Honorary senior researcher at theEHESS, Head of the scientific committee of the

Observatoire des Sciences et TechniquesDiscussant: Serge Haroche, Professor at the Collègede France

Friday 15 October 2010

The researcher’s ethics in the face of globalisation� The research boom in developing countries andinternational cooperationMarc Fontecave, Professor at the Collège de France(the example of India)Discussant: Jacques Livage, Honorary professor atthe Collège de France (the example of North Africa) � Worldwide knowledge sharing on a global scaleGabriele Veneziano, Professor at the Collège deFrance, Emeritus professor at the CERN (particlephysics)Discussant: Xavier Le Pichon, Honorary professor atthe Collège de France (geodynamics) � Changing scales and the worldwide cooperativemanagement of biological meansPhilippe Kourilsky, Professor at the Collège de FranceDiscussant: Pierre Corvol, Professor at the Collège deFrance (medical and pharmaceutical research)� Small and large scientific frauds: the weight ofcompetitionAnne Fagot-Largeault, Honorary professor at theCollège de FranceDiscussant: Alain Prochiantz, Professor at the Collègede France� The ‘disinterested’ role of researchers in promotinga new global legal orderMireille Delmas-Marty, Professor at the Collège deFranceDiscussant: Peter Piot, Former chief executive ofUNAIDS, Professor at Imperial College, London,Professor at the Collège de France (2009–2010)(international organisations)

� Roundtable: restructurings and evaluation toolsaround the worldWith the participation of: - Stephan Leibfried, Professor of political science atthe University of Bremen, a member of the Academyof Sciences of Berlin;- Jacob Palis, Professor at the Institute of Pure andApplied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); - Jean-François Sabouret, Senior researcher at theCNRS, Director of Réseau-Asie;- Pierre Veltz, Professor at the École des SciencesPolitique and at the École des Ponts, Paris Tech; - Elias Zerhouni, Former Director, National Institutesof Health (USA), Professor at the Collège de France(2010–2011).


History, through time As the Renaissance spread throughout Europe, great minds startedto explore subjects that had previously aroused no curiosity, and theinvention of printing meant that the wealth of philosophy contained inthe chefs-d’œuvre of Antiquity was becoming more widely available.Teachers capable of interpreting and commenting on these matterswere in demand. Thus, the Collège Royal was set up, which laterbecame known as the Collège de France.

1530King François I, on the advice of Guillaume Budé, his “master of thelibrary”, appointed six “royal readers”: three for Hebrew (FrançoisVatable, Agathias Guidacerius, Paul Paradis), two for Greek (PierreDanès, Jacques Toussaint) and one for mathematics (Oronce Finé).Their lectures were free and open to anyone1551

1551After requisitioning the Collèges de Tréguier and de Cambrai where heinstalled “royal readers” in 1551, Henri II extended the range of subjectstaught by the Collège to philosophy. He created a chair for Ramus (Pierrede la Ramée), a notorious and controversial anti-Aristotelian philosopher,who then went on to teach mathematics from 1559 onwards.

1567The Collège was mentioned for the first time in a document. It was adiploma awarded to Nicolas Goulu, certifying that he was qualified toteach Greek.

1610On August 28, Louis XIII laid the first stone of a new building bearingthe following inscription: “In the first year of the Reign of Louis XIIIKing of France and of Navarre, aged nine, and of the Regency ofQueen Marie de Médicis his mother MDCX” (En l’an premier duRegne de Louis XIII Roy de France et de Navarre, agé de neuf ans,et de la Regence de la Royne Marie de Médicis sa mère MDCX).

1699On January 18, 1699, the Collège Royal was granted its coat ofarms: against a sky blue background there is a silver book lying openin which are written the words Docet omnia. The book is surroundedby three golden fleurs-de- lis, two at the top and one at the bottom.

1707There were now twenty chairs: eleven for the arts, nine for scientificsubjects.

1772Louis XV entrusted the architect Jean-François Chalgrin with theconstruction of the Collège Royal. Chalgrin was a winner of the Grandprix de Rome and a member of the Académie d'architecture. On May16, the Collège was incorporated into the University of Paris. It regainedits independence in 1794. On March 22, 1774, the Duc de La Vrillièrelaid the first stone of the new buildings, which were completed in 1778.

1824A picture portraying the establishment of the “royal readers” byFrançois I (on display in the Assembly room). It was painted byG. Guillon Lethière.

1870The Collège Royal then the Collège Impérial became the Collège deFrance. There were now forty professors.

1963The creation of two new chairs brought to fifty-two the number ofprofessors.

1976The professors were allowed to give some of their teaching outsideParis.

1988The professors were allowed to give some of their teaching abroad.

1989Creation of the European chair.

1992Creation of International chair.

1998Inauguration of new Collège de France premises. The renovationwas carried out by the architects Bernard Huet and Jean-MichelWilmotte.

2005Creation of the chair of Artistic Creation.

2006Creation of the chair ofTechnological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt.

2009Creation of the chair ofInformation Technology and Digital Sciences

AGENDA

Academic Year 2010–2011

New Chairs Created� Physics of the Earth's Interior� Chemistry of Hybrid Materials� Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge

New Professors� Ismail SERAGELDIN, Knowledge against Poverty, 2010–2011

Inaugural lecture: 18 November 2010� Anselm KIEFER, Artistic Creation, 2010–2011

Inaugural lecture: 2 December 2010� Jean-Marie TARASCON, Sustainable Development–Environment, Energy and

Society, 2010–2011Inaugural lecture: 16 December 2010

� Elias ZERHOUNI, Chair of Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt 2010–2011Inaugural lecture: 20 January 2011

� Martin ABADI, Chair of Information Technology and Digital Sciences, 2010–2011Inaugural lecture: 10 March 2011

The Inaugural Lectures take place at 6 pm in the Marguerite de Navarre Lecture Hall.

Guest Conference Speakers� Timothy BROOK, Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada)� Anne-Laure DALIBARD, Chargée de recherche au CNRS� Hans HELANDER, Emeritus Professor, University of Uppsala (Sweden)� Lars LIND, Professor, University of Uppsala (Sweden)� Agostino PARAVICINI BAGLIANI, Emeritus Professor, University of

Lausanne (Switzerland)� Simon PRICE, Professor, Oxford University (Great Britain)� Victor STOICHITA, Professor, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)

The Letter of the Collège de FranceDirecteurs de la publication : Pierre CORVOL, Administrateur du Collège de France et

Florence TERRASSE-RIOU, Directrice des Affaires culturelles et des relations extérieuresDirection éditoriale : Marc KIRSCH - Patricia LLEGOU

Traduction : Liz LIBBRECHT - Conception graphique : Patricia LLEGOUCrédits photos : © Collège de France, PATRICK IMBERT - Reproduction autorisée avec mention d’origine.

ISSN 1958-1408 - Impression : ADVENCE

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