(loosely adapted from a news article published on France 24 on 22 March.)
"You, a Jew and a resistance fighter at age 15, you were attacked with the most horrible insults and compared to a Nazi (...) But you held on, for the love of freedom and science", stated President Emmanuel Macron at the beginning of this month when he presented Professor Emile-Etienne Baulieu with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.
"Adversity glides over him like water off the feathers of a duck, he is extremely solid," said his wife of 30 years, film producer Simone Harari Baulieu.
Baulieu, 96 today, still works at the Kremlin-Bicêtre University Hospital in Paris, surrounded by mementos of a lifetime of research, because he still wants to "be useful".
If he discreetly wears his recent decoration on his blue suit, he claims to have "never seriously hoped to receive such honors". “It made me happy, but what interests me is to improve the health of people".
In his lab, his team is continuing the research he began years ago to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, but also to treat severe depression. “There is no reason that we cannot find treatments”, he said.
"He is always enthusiastic, he is a driving force for all of us,” added Julien Giustiniani, team leader at the Baulieu Institute, created to finance research on senile dementia.
If he has to use a cane to walk, Baulieu seems tireless. This user of DHEA, a natural hormone which he thinks can delay aging and whose secretion by the adrenal glands he described in 1963, still goes regularly to attend medical conferences, to be "stimulated by difficult subjects".
Invited to work in the United States, he was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to work on sex hormones. Back in France, he designed an anti-hormone, which opposes the action of progesterone, essential for the implantation of the egg in the uterus. "I wanted to make it a contragestive", he explained, “that is to say a means of countering gestation.”
The RU-846 molecule, developed in 1982 in partnership with with the Roussel-Uclaf laboratory is a medicinal alternative to surgical abortion, safe and inexpensive. But its marketing was opposed by the powerful American anti-abortion lobby.
"It is a scandal, a setback for women's freedom" Baulieu stated, when commenting upon the recent ban by Wyoming, “especially for the most precarious women who do not have the means to go to another state to obtain it".
Professor Baulieu has done more to help humanity in his one lifetime than all the zealots who passed that bill have done combined.