Maxime Simon Schwartz, born in June 1940 [1] in Blois (Loir-et-Cher), [2] is a French molecular biologist who has been a research director at the CNRS, a professor at the Pasteur Institute and Director General of the Pasteur Institute. He is a correspondant of the French Academy of sciences.
Maxime Schwartz was born on 1 June 1940 in Blois, Loir-et-Cher. He is the son of Daniel Schwartz (1917-2009) [3] (X, 1937) and Yvonne Berr (1917-2001). His paternal grandparents were Anselme Schwartz, surgeon, and Claire Debré, sister of the pediatrician Robert Debré. His maternal grandparents were Raymond Berr [4] (X, 1907), director of the Kuhlmann Establishment and Antoinette Rodrigues Ely, who died in deportation, and their daughter Hélène Berr. [5]
With his brother Yves, he is a nephew of Laurent Schwartz [6] and Bertrand Schwartz (X, 1939), his father's brothers.
After completing his secondary education at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, he entered the École Polytechnique in 1959. A student at this institution until 1961, he then did his military service (1961-1962) in the Navy in Toulon, where he worked alongside Henri Laborit. [7]
In 1962-1963, Maxime Schwartz prepared and obtained a mixed degree in physics and biology.
From 1964 to 1967, under the direction of Jacques Monod, [8] at the Pasteur Institute, he prepared a doctorate, which he defended in June 1967. During the preparation of this doctorate he benefited from the advice of François Jacob, with whom he worked for more than thirty years. [9] [10]
From 1967 to 1969, as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows at Harvard University, he carried out a postdoctoral internship in James Watson's laboratory at that university. He spent the last three months of 1969 at the Salk Institute, where he collaborated with Suzanne Bourgeois in the laboratory of Melvin Cohn.
After his doctorate, Maxime Schwartz returned to the Pasteur Institute, where he remained for most of his career. He first worked there as a researcher at the CNRS, and then, from 1973, as a CNRS/Institut Pasteur dual member.
At the CNRS, he was a research professor from 1971 to 1986 and research director from 1986 to 2007.
At the Pasteur Institute, he was head of laboratory from 1973 to 1984 and then professor from 1984 to 2007.
From 1975 to 1995, he was head of the Molecular Genetics Unit at the Pasteur Institute.
From 1985 to 1987, he was Deputy Director (Scientific Director) of the Pasteur Institute.
From 1988 to 1999, he was Director General of the Pasteur Institute.
From 2000 to 2001, he was Head of the Cell Physiology Unit at the Pasteur Institute.
Since 2007, the year of his retirement, he has been a chargé de mission with the management of the Institut Pasteur.
From 2002 to 2006, he was Scientific Director of the French Food Safety Agency, headed by Martin Hirsch, then Pascale Briand.
On March 30, 1987, Maxime Schwartz was elected correspondant of the French Academy of sciences, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology and Genomics section. [11]
S.A. Waksman Gold Medal of the French Academy of sciences (1974).
Richard Lounsbery Prize of the French Academy of sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (1984).
Officier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Commandeur of the Ordre National du Mérite May 2, 2017 (Officier of September 27, 1994) [12]
Officier of the Légion d'Honneur
Commandeur of the Ordre du Lion (Senegal)
Commandeur of the Order of the Southern Cross (Brazil)
Maxime Schwartz's scientific work concerns various aspects of the metabolism of a sugar, maltose, in the bacterium Escherichia coli . These have enabled him to address very general questions, such as the regulation of protein synthesis and the structure, functions and biogenesis of membrane proteins. [13] François Jacob and Jacques Monod's work on the metabolism of another sugar, lactose, in the same bacterium led them to propose that the expression of genes encoding the enzymes necessary for the metabolism of this sugar is blocked by a repressor, a regulatory protein whose action is itself inhibited in the presence of lactose. The unblocking of the genes thus results from the inhibition of the repressor [14] [15] . This regulation involving a double inhibition was later to be qualified as negative. Based on his work on maltose metabolism, Maxime Schwartz was one of the first to suggest the existence of positive regulation, the expression of genes resulting from the activation of an activator [16] . Positive regulation mechanisms subsequently proved to be extremely frequent in all living cells. The most original aspect of Maxime Schwartz's work on membrane proteins is the demonstration that one of the proteins allowing the transport of maltose through the bacterial envelope serves as a receptor for a bacterial virus, the bacteriophage lambda. [17] It was a novel notion that virus receptors are proteins with a well-defined function for the target cell. This is now a well-established fact for many, many viruses. Maxime Schwartz has also been interested, in collaboration with the laboratory of the American Jonathan Beckwith, in the mechanisms that allow proteins to be placed in various layers of the bacterial envelope. Using genetic methods, he is helping to demonstrate that the signal sequence, located at the amino-terminal end of membrane-through proteins and defined by Gunther Blobel's group, is indeed necessary for the transport of these proteins across the cytoplasm membrane, but is not sufficient. [18] [19] Indeed the inactivation by mutation of the signal sequence prevents such a protein from crossing the membrane; on the other hand the single addition of a signal sequence to the end of a cytoplasmic protein is not sufficient to make it cross the membrane.
Managing Director of the Institut Pasteur for two consecutive six-year terms, Maxime Schwartz is striving to continue the work of modernization begun by his predecessors, Jacques Monod, François Gros and Raymond Dedonder. On the Paris campus, he presided over the construction of several new buildings, including the Scientific Information Centre, financed by the bequest from the Duchess of Windsor, and undertook the renovation of most of the laboratories located in older buildings. He also continued the development of the International Network of Pasteur Institutes (which he named), upgrading the equipment of the old institutes, integrating foreign institutes such as those in St. Petersburg and Romania, building a new institute in Cambodia, and initiating the creation of a joint laboratory between the Pasteur Institute and the University of Hong Kong. At the scientific level, it promotes the application of molecular biology techniques to the study of infectious diseases, thus allowing the emergence of several teams of great international reputation. In addition, he works to develop and modernize relations between research and industry, presiding in particular over the creation of the first "start-ups" created by researchers from the institute. In 1994, Maxime Schwartz succeeded in getting the American government to admit that the virus isolated by the American Robert Gallo as being the AIDS virus was none other than the virus that the Pasteurian Luc Montagnier had sent him a year earlier; he thus put an end to a 10-year-old controversy involving scientific ethics as well as financial aspects. [20]
With the title of Director of Laboratory Programming, Maxime Schwartz worked for 5 years as Scientific Director of the laboratories of the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA). As such, he notably launched a European Network of Excellence, MED-VET-NET, bringing together veterinary and human medicine laboratories for the study of diseases transmitted to humans by animals. In this agency, he also chairs the "Biotechnology" expert committee whose main objective is to give opinions to public authorities on the marketing of genetically modified organisms.
Maxime Schwartz is author or co-author of the following books:
François Jacob was a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through regulation of transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
Félix d'Hérelle was a French microbiologist. He was co-discoverer of bacteriophages and experimented with the possibility of phage therapy. D'Hérelle has also been credited for his contributions to the larger concept of applied microbiology.
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".
The Pasteur Institute is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax and rabies. The institute was founded on 4 June 1887, and inaugurated on 14 November 1888.
Escherichia virus T4 is a species of bacteriophages that infect Escherichia coli bacteria. It is a double-stranded DNA virus in the subfamily Tevenvirinae from the family Myoviridae. T4 is capable of undergoing only a lytic life cycle and not the lysogenic life cycle. The species was formerly named T-even bacteriophage, a name which also encompasses, among other strains, Enterobacteria phage T2, Enterobacteria phage T4 and Enterobacteria phage T6.
Arthur Beck Pardee was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not affected by his work, which has advanced our understanding through theoretical predictions followed by insightful experiments. He is perhaps most famous for his part in the 'PaJaMo experiment' of the late 1950s, which greatly helped in the discovery of messenger RNA. He is also well known as the discoverer of the restriction point, in which a cell commits itself to certain cell cycle events during the G1 cycle. He did a great deal of work on tumor growth and regulation, with a particular focus on the role of estrogen in hormone-responsive tumors. He is also well known for the development of various biochemical research techniques, most notably the differential display methodology, which is used in examining the activation of genes in cells. More recently he championed the acceptance and adoption of the conceptual review as a valuable approach to unearthing new knowledge from the enormous stores of information in the scientific literature. He died in February 2019 at the age of 97.
Jean-Pierre Lecocq was a Belgian molecular biologist and entrepreneur.
Maltose-binding protein (MBP) is a part of the maltose/maltodextrin system of Escherichia coli, which is responsible for the uptake and efficient catabolism of maltodextrins. It is a complex regulatory and transport system involving many proteins and protein complexes. MBP has an approximate molecular mass of 42.5 kilodaltons.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is a French virologist and Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division and Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. Born in Paris, France, Barré-Sinoussi performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. In 2008, Barré-Sinoussi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with her former mentor, Luc Montagnier, for their discovery of HIV. She mandatorily retired from active research on August 31, 2015 and fully retired by some time in 2017.
Philippe J. Sansonetti is a French microbiologist, professor at the Pasteur Institute and the Collège de France in Paris. He is the director of the Inserm Unit 786 and of the Institut Pasteur laboratory Pathogénie Microbienne Moléculaire.
Escherichia coli is a Gram-negative gammaproteobacterium commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms (endotherms). The descendants of two isolates, K-12 and B strain, are used routinely in molecular biology as both a tool and a model organism.
Diauxic growth, diauxie or diphasic growth is any cell growth characterized by cellular growth in two phases. Diauxic growth, meaning double growth, is caused by the presence of two sugars on a culture growth media, one of which is easier for the target bacterium to metabolize. The preferred sugar is consumed first, which leads to rapid growth, followed by a lag phase. During the lag phase the cellular machinery used to metabolize the second sugar is activated and subsequently the second sugar is metabolized.
Stuart J. Edelstein is a biophysicist, emeritus professor from the University of Geneva, professeur extraordinaire at the École Normale Supérieure and visiting scientist at the Babraham Institute.
The Pasteur Institute of Nha Trang is one of two Institut Pasteur in Vietnam. Located in Nha Trang, it was established during the French colonization of Vietnam. It operates directly under the authority of the Vietnamese Ministry of Health.
Michel E. Goldberg is a French biophysicist who specialized in the study of protein folding and aggregation. He spent most of his scientific career at the Pasteur Institute, becoming a laboratory head in 1972 and serving as the Scientific Director from 1976 to 1979. He also held a variety of roles with the Pasteur-Weizmann Council, a partnership between the Pasteur Institute in France and the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Goldberg retired in 2005.
Agnes Ullmann was a French microbiologist.
Moshe Yaniv, born in 1938 in Hadera, Israel, is a French-Israeli molecular biologist who has studied the structure and functions of oncogenic DNA viruses as well as the general mechanisms for regulating gene expression in higher organisms and their deregulation during tumor pathologies and development. He is a member of the French Academy of sciences and Professor Emeritus at the Institut Pasteur.
Michel Delseny is director of research emeritus at the CNRS and a member of the French Academy of sciences.
David Schlessinger is a Canadian-born American biochemist, microbiologist, and geneticist. He is known for his directorship of the development of the map of the X chromosome.
Elisabeth Wollman (1888–1943) was a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Born in Minsk in a Jewish family, she graduated from the University of Liège with a degree in physics and mathematics. She married the son of family friends, Eugène Wollman, and moved with him to Paris, where he began his career at the Pasteur Institute. Pioneers in the field of molecular genetics, the Wollmans collaborated for two decades on work that lay critical groundwork for understanding viruses, cancer, and HIV.
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