| Albert Jacquard | |
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Albert Jacquard in 2009
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| Born | 23 December 1925 Lyon, Rhône, France |
| Residence | France, Switzerland, United States |
| Citizenship | French (1925-) |
| Fields | Geneticist |
| Institutions | Institute of statistics SEITA (Paris) French Court of Financial Auditor French Institute for Demographical Studies World Health Organization French Comité consultatif national d'éthique |
| Alma mater | Polytechnical School Stanford University (PhD) |
| Notable awards | French Légion d'honneur (1980) French Ordre national du Mérite (1980) Fondation de France scientific medal (1980) |
Albert Jacquard (born in Lyon on 23 December 1925) is a French geneticist and essayist. He is well known for defending ideas related to the concept of degrowth.
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He was born in a catholic and conservative family from the region of Franche-Comté (east of France). At the age of nine, he was disfigured after a car accident in which his brother died. In 1943, he earned two baccalaureates in mathematics and philosophy. In 1948, he earned a master degree in public factory engineering from the French Polytechnical School and joined the French Institute of statistics.
In 1951, he entered the French tobacco monopoly SEITA (which merged with its Spanish counterpart Tabacalera to form Altadis in 1999) as an organisation and method engineer. Then, he worked as a rapporteur in the French Court of Financial Auditor (equivalent to the US Government Accountability Office) and as a senior executive in the French Health ministry. In 1966, he went to Stanford University to study population genetics as a Research worker. Back in France in 1968, he joined French Institute for Demographic Studies as supervisor of the genetics department. In 1973, he was appointed expert in genetics in the World Health Organisation. He retired in 1985.
While he was still working in the World Health Organization, he taught as visiting professor several university such as the University of Geneva in Switzerland (1973–1976), Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (1978–1990) or the Catholic University of Leuvain in Belgium (1979–1981). As a recognition for his work, he was awarded the French Légion d'honneur, the French Ordre national du Mérite and the Fondation de France scientific medal.
| “ | I have no solution : I don’t intend to build the society of tomorrow. I just want to show that it must not resemble the society of today | ” |
While he was part of the French Consultative Committee of Ethics (Comité consultatif national d'éthique) in the early 1990s, he took a strong stand against commercial use of the human genome.
He is now very close to the anti-globalization movement and regularly comes to defense of illegal immigrants and homeless people in France.
He wrote several books to expose his views and share his experience with new generations. He has made a variety of public statements in favor of choosing Esperanto as a universal second language in contradiction to tendencies in Europe to use English as a second language.