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- 65 years, married, two children
- Consultant Professor at the Paris-Grignon National Agricultural Institute
- Member of the Académie d’agriculture
Distinctions:
- Knight of the French Legion of Honour
- Officier du Mérite Agricole
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Jean-Paul Renard
Research Director receives the 2010 Agricultural Research Award for Scientific Excellence
(12/10/2010)
© INRA
Jean-Paul Renard has devoted a career spanning four decades to the study of the most fundamental aspects of the earliest stages of embryogenesis. Now a research director at the Reproduction and Developmental Biology Unit of the INRA Jouy-en-Josas centre, under the Animal Physiology and Livestock Systems Division, Renard has spent his career seeking to gain a better understanding of the development programme that takes place during the transition from the egg to the embryo’s first cellular differentiations. In 1998, with the birth of a cow named Marguerite in the stables of INRA Jouy-en-Josas, he and his team confirmed that the total reversibility of this programme is possible with somatic cloning.
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Astrophysics isn’t the only place one can go back in time! Jean-Paul Renard’s research on embryogenesis proves this, especially with the birth of Marguerite, the first cloned cow and the pinnacle of his research, showing that it was possible to “retrace” a cell’s biological clock. Marguerite came from embryos that were reconstituted after a differentiated donor cell nucleus was transfered into an recipient oocyte (1) from which the nucleus had been removed. The enucleated oocyte gives the “adult” nucleus the potential of the fertilised egg. Once these embryos are implanted in a surrogate mother, they can turn into clones of the donor animal, because they were formed from the same genome. “We have since shown that clones that reach adulthood are physiologically normal, fertile animals and that they are not ‘carbon copies’ even though they have the same genome.” Renard’s team also contributed to the development of an INRA field of expertise, on the quality of meat and milk from cloned bovines, through studies that began in 2003 and which have no equivalent in any other country.
Seeking the beginnings of life
The Reproduction and Developmental Biology lab (2) - which Renard created in 2000 and headed for ten years - continues to study clones “because they allow us to study the mechanisms of development from a very unique situation. The embryo’s nucleus has to reprogramme its activities before becoming an embryonic nucleus. Cloning allows us to analyse this process. The limitations placed on the nucleus are compatible with harmonious development but may also lead to physiological disorders that manifest later during gestation, if not after birth or even only in adulthood. At first we were very surprised by this observation”. He and his team now know that some of these deregulations are due to the placenta, which serves as the link between fetus and the maternal environment. “The scientific relevance lies in the fact that cloning makes it possible to study the development of organisms that have the same nuclear genome, but different cytoplasms (3) and that may be implanted in different uteri. We can then observe their ability to adapt to their environment. This helps us understand why some animals are sturdier than others in the face of environmental disturbances,” explained the sought-after scientist. Renard uses his fame and influence to launch partnerships with international teams such as those of the University of Illinois, to create an atlas of bovine gene expression during peri-implantation development, or with the Academy of Sciences in Beijing for a programme on animal embryonic stem cells.
Ethics and the precepts of an exceptional scientific career
“Jean-Paul Renard investigates very fundamental biological mechanisms so he can address specific research questions,” said Philippe Chemineau, who helmed the Animal Physiology and Livestock Systems division at INRA. “He comes straight from the Enlightenment: an agronomist by training who is both scientist and philosopher. Therein lies his strength.” In 1982, Renard joined the French National Ethics Advisory Committee for Health and Life, which regulates life science research, and remained there for nine years. Today, he continues to ask this question. “With ever more powerful tools for molecular analysis, with the power of mathematical modelling, the arrival of nanotechnology in biology, and the emergence of synthetic biology, research is moving at an even greater pace. The quest for knowledge is always there, but we need to invent new relationships with society based on the fundamental questions: can we aspire to know everything? Is there some knowledge we should not pursue?”
Fundamental embrylogy, a researcher’s quest
Renard recalls his first major scientific finding, in 1986, after some ten years of research at the mammalian genetics laboratory of the Pasteur Institute. At the time, he was studying the respective roles of paternal and maternal genomes in egg formation. “While working on mutant murine cell lines, I was able to isolate and identify a very specific action of the paternal genome on nucleus-cytoplasm interactions in the embryo.” In this case, the embryo’s development stops at the blastocyst stage, during which cells begin to differentiate. Much remains to be discovered, but the scientist continues his research to determine when the embryonic genome begins to be active. At 65, a few days from the end of his professional career, Jean-Paul Renard remains fascinated by the extraordinary plasticity of the “fragile yet extremely hardy” embryos and cells that gave him a taste for research.
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 His reaction to the INRA Awards
“I contributed to reshaping biological dogma on the impossibility of conserving an embryo’s life indefinitely, as though it were going back in biological time. Our research has had ramifications in both the conservation of biological diversity as well as the enhancement of mammalian reproduction. It has also encouraged scientists to pay attention to debates on the evolution of life science research”.
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(1) Female reproductive cell that becomes an ovum once it is fertilised. The male reproductive cell is called a spermatozoid.
(2) An INRA and Ecole Vétérinaire d’Alfort joint research unit.
(3) Substance forming the cell but excluding the nucleus.
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Written by :
Communications Department
Date of creation : 28/10/2010
Date of last update : 28/10/2010
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