Jean-Claude Weill is one of the most important biology and immunologists of France, is a member of the Academy of Sciences and has received the prestigious Prix d’Honneur of Inserm “for lifetime achievement”.
Nobel’s friend (at least a dozen) worked in America and Switzerland. With a snappy physique, leonine hair, he goes to the laboratory every day: at 81 he still considers himself “a debutant”. It matters little that 40 years have passed since his most important discovery: the molecular mechanisms of cell diversification underlying adaptive immunity. The secret was kept in Fabrizio’s bag, the final part of the chicken intestine. He says amused: “They told me: Jean-Claude, who makes you do it, what do you care about chickens?”. And yet just a few months ago a study was published revealing that around 20 percent of the antibodies in humans also use mechanisms similar to those found in chickens: it is the best way to fight against the most pathogenic bacteria, such as those of Pneumococcus or Meningococcus. But it is not to talk about chickens, lymphocytes and bacteria that Professor Weill decided to write his latest book. In Praise of the unexpected (Praise for the unexpected, just published in France by Bélin editions) Weill wanted above all to tell his story – that of a former dentist, lover of nightclubs, happy husband of a former model, who became a researcher at 40 – and to declare his love for scientific research: «The most important discoveries of the last fifty years – he writes – were made by outsider, eccentric researchers, who threw themselves into research as if it were an adventure, without fear of taking risks and above all of making mistakes. Just so you know, the greatest researchers are the ones who make mistakes. Sometimes always.”
Professor Weill, don’t you think you chose the wrong moment to praise the unexpected? Looking around the world, a few more certainties and accurate predictions would perhaps be healthy…
«Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, liked to say that every prediction is difficult, especially if it concerns the future. Can we perhaps know what dust the next asteroid that falls on Earth will raise? Or what will be next pandemic? Or the next virus, the next bacterium? No scientist can predict the future. The best system to deal with the unexpected, as immune systems also teach us, is diversity. If you can’t predict the virus, you organize yourself to have 5 million different “arms”. The chances of there being one that works are high. You can’t predict, but you can produce diversity.”
His book is full of examples of scientists – almost all Nobel – and discoveries whose path was bumpy, not to mention random, or atypical. Like Kary Mullis, discoverer of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, at the origin of the now world-famous PCR tests, surfer user of LSD. Or chemotherapy, discovered by chance after a bombing of an allied ship full of mustard gas in the Gulf of Bari…
«The truth is that in terms of scientific research you absolutely cannot predict who will make that discovery. It’s not because you’re top of the class, the best at the Polytechnic, or at the Scuola Normale, that it will be you. If it worked like this we would have already solved all our problems and found the remedies Parkinsonall’Alzheimer: let’s give 200 million dollars to the best and see you in five years with the solution. Here too: diversity must be cultivated. The top of the class are also needed, of course, everyone is needed, human diversity is needed.”
You continue to work, what is the atmosphere like in the laboratories today?
«Unfortunately, atypical routes are less frequent. Young researchers are too often asked to fit into a mold, to format themselves. I got an idea of the problem…”.
Which?
«The evolution of human beings has worked in an unbalanced way. There is an enormous gap between the level of cognitive knowledge in all fields – physics, chemistry, biology, gene therapy – and the evolution of behaviors: from this point of view, humans have practically remained stuck in Neanderthals, they have the same desires, passions, jealousies, rivalries, have not evolved. This gap between knowledge and behavior is a source of total unhappiness. 65 million years ago a asteroid 12 kilometers in diameter fell into Mexico, raising sulfur and silicate dust: 75 percent of life on earth disappeared. Today I tell myself that another similar explosion is inevitable, given this unsustainable gap between technical knowledge and human behavior. I hope that when theevolution will start again, we will have a parallel evolution between behavior and technique. Am I going a little too far?”
Here: how do we distinguish the brilliant scientist from the mad scientist? With Covid we have seen the proliferation of fake news that could seem true.
«At the basis of everything there is always respect for scientific rigor. And scientific rigor is protected by putting one’s work under scrutiny by the scientific community. Science is teamwork. If you have an idea, you come up with a hypothesis, you have a hunch, you need to go to the board and show it to your team. If it doesn’t work, within an hour maximum there will be someone who raises their hand to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.”
Is this why you would like to reform the Nobel Prize?
“Yes. There is no discovery that is not collective, that is not the sum of many discoveries. The Nobel rewards a maximum of three scientists, this is what Alfred wanted, but this is never right. The prize should be given to the discovery and not to the discoverer. Reward all those, dead and alive, who contributed to it, and there are always many, certainly more than three.”
In the book you list your failures with more satisfaction than your successes. Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?
«Making mistakes is the most important part of research work. The most important quality of the researcher is not intelligence, I take that for granted, like the driving license for the Formula One driver: the most important quality is resistance to failure. The taste for risk and the ability to take defeat. Doing research means choosing to open a box: in 98 percent of cases we will discover that there is nothing inside that box. That’s the one science. The system should support those who make mistakes more, but instead it demands too much results, it bases everything on publications. We must protect intuition, it is our most precious asset.”
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