The 2021 Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prize

Jacqueline Pasteur Vallery-Radot, the wife of Louis Pasteur's grandson, chose the National Library of France (BnF) as the residuary legatee of her estate. Under the terms of her will, the BnF awards two prizes every year, in consultation with the Institut Pasteur, funded by the revenue from her legacy.

Since 2007, these prizes have been awarded annually to two French Institut Pasteur scientists under the age of 50 who have led a major scientific project in the field of biology or physics/chemistry over the last five years, thus proving themselves to be worthy heirs of Pasteur himself. Winners are chosen by a panel of Institut Pasteur and French Academy of Sciences members, chaired by the Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

This year, the two Pasteur Vallery-Radot Prizes went to:

 

Jérôme Gros, Research Director at the Institut Pasteur and Head of the Dynamic Regulation of Morphogenesis Unit, for his research to elucidate how molecular and mechanical signals are integrated at cellular level, resulting in the self-organization of embryonic structures,

 

 

Etienne Patin, a population geneticist and CNRS scientist at the Institut Pasteur in the Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit, who is studying the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and aiming to reconstruct how human health has changed in recent millennia.

 

 

 

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