A bicentenary tribute to Louis Pasteur, Foreign Member of the Royal Society

Sir Jim Smith FMedSci FRS, The Francis Crick Institute, UK

Jim Smith is renowned for his work on cell-to-cell signalling in the early development of the amphibian embryo. His discovery of a mesoderm-inducing factor secreted by a cell line and establishing its identity as activin transformed the study of induction in the early embryo. He also showed that activin specifies different cell types at different thresholds and that characteristic genes like Brachyury are turned on at specific concentrations. His earlier work demonstrated threshold responses in chick limb development and also showed that the mitogenic response to growth factors can be active when attached to the extracellular matrix.

Professor Pascale Cossart ForMemRS, Institut Pasteur, France

Pascale Cossart, after studying chemistry in Lille (France) obtained a master degree at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Back in France, she obtained her PhD in Paris in the Institut Pasteur where she is still now, heading the Bacteria-Cell Interactions unit which is also an Inserm and an INRA unit. After studying DNA-protein interactions, in E. coli, she started in 1986, to study the molecular and cellular basis of infections by intracellular bacteria taking as a model the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. Her research has led to a number of new concepts in infection biology but also in fundamental microbiology, in cell biology and more recently in epigenetics.

Pascale Cossart is considered as a pioneer in Cellular Microbiology. Her contributions have been recognized by a number of awards, including the Robert Koch Prize (2007), the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2008), the Balzan Prize (2013). She is a member of the French Academy of Science (2002), a foreign member of the American National Academy of Science (2009), of the German Leopoldina (2001), and of the Royal Society (2010).

Professor Stewart Cole FRS KCMG, Institut Pasteur, France

Stewart Cole is an internationally renowned scientist and Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis. Since 2 January 2018, he is President of the Institut Pasteur.

From 2007 to 2017, he has served as Professor and Director of the Global Health Institute at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) – a world-leading education and research center.

For 24 years Cole worked as a researcher and also held various research management positions at the Institut Pasteur. He was Director of Strategic Technologies and then Executive Scientific Director, contributing to several patent applications relating to HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. He participated in the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Institut Pasteur in Iran, the Institut Pasteur in Montevideo and the Institut Pasteur in Lille. Professor Cole was also acting President of the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 2005.

He has been the recipient of many national and international prizes and distinctions. In 2009, he was awarded the World Health Organization’s prestigious Stop-TB Partnership Kochon Prize for his leadership and groundbreaking accomplishments in genetic research on M. tuberculosis and his contribution to novel therapeutic strategies for tackling TB.

During his career, he has been involved in the work of several foundations and scientific committees, and was notably Chair of the board of the Innovative Medicine for Tuberculosis Foundation and President of the commission médicale for the Fondation Raoul Follereau.

Stewart Cole has also published more than 350 scientific papers on infectious diseases, most notably tuberculosis and leprosy.

Professor Cole was awarded with the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2004 and was appointed as Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for service to science, on 1 January 2022.

Professor Peter Leadlay FRS, University of Cambridge, UK

Peter Leadlay studied chemistry at Oxford (1967-1974), and after a postdoc at ETH Zürich worked at the Biochemistry Department in Cambridge, becoming inaugural Herchel Smith Professor of Biochemistry in 2006. His research interests have centered on the chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, genomics and evolution of microbial natural products; and their role in pharmaceutical discovery. He has deciphered the biosynthetic pathways to multiple classes of antibiotic; and co-discovered the modular paradigm for enzyme catalysis used by multienzymes that synthesise complex polyketides and polypeptides. These pathways can be rationally altered to produce modified chemical products with potentially useful bioactivity. This work has launched the synthetic biology companies Biotica and Isomerase. 

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000. He held a visiting Chaire de Recherche 'Blaise Pascal' at the Institut Pasteur Paris in 2003; and an international research award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at TU Berlin in 2013. He is the recipient of inter alia the 2003 RSC Celltech Medal, the 2007 Remsen award of the American Chemical Society, and the 2012 Inhoffen Medal of the Helmholtz Foundation for Infection Research, Germany. 

Dr Isabelle Buckle, Institut Pasteur, France

Isabelle Buckle PhD has 25 years of international scientific and business experience in biotechnology, including Vice President of Clinical Applications in Mass Spectrometry at Bruker Daltonics; President and CEO of InGen Biosciences (an in vitro diagnostics company); International Director of Global Key Account Development for the pharmaceutical industry at Life Technologies, now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific; and Regional Director of European Diagnostic Partnerships at Ciphergen Biosystems. Dr Buckle began her career at Pharmacia Biotech, a GE company. She is now Director of Research Applications and Industry Relations at the Institut Pasteur.

Dr Ewan Birney CBE FRS FMedSci

Deputy Director General, EMBL & Director, EMBL-EBI

Ewan Birney is Deputy Director General of EMBL. He is also Director of EMBL-EBI with Dr Rolf Apweiler and runs a small research group.

Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin. In 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide data at EMBL-EBI and in 2012 he took on the role of Associate Director at the institute. He became Director of EMBL-EBI in 2015. In 2020, Ewan became the Deputy Director General of EMBL. In this role, he assists the EMBL Director General in relation to engagement with EMBL Member States and external representation.

Ewan led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, mouse and chicken genomes and the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences in humans and Medaka fish) and use of images for chromatin structure.

Ewan is a non-executive Director of Genomics England, and a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Dovetail Genomics and GSK. Ewan was elected an EMBO member in 2012, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. In 2019, Ewan became a Board Member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

He has received a number of awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics.

Professor Fiona Powrie FRS, Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford, UK

Professor Dame Fiona Powrie is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Governor of the Wellcome Trust. 

She gained a PhD in immunology at the University of Oxford and then moved to the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, before returning to Oxford in 1996 as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. Prior to her appointment to the Kennedy Institute, Fiona Powrie was the Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology and Head of the Translational Gastroenterology Unit, Oxford (2009- 2014). 

Her research examines the relationship between the intestinal microbiome and the host immune system and how this mutualistic relationship breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis and cancer. 

Fiona Powrie has received numerous prestigious prizes and awards, including the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2012. She was elected an international member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and was appointed Deputy Chair of the Wellcome Board of Governors and Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE), for services to Medical Science, in 2022.

Sir Paul Nurse CH FMedSci FRS, Francis Crick Institute, UK

Paul Nurse is a geneticist and cell biologist whose discoveries have helped to explain how the cell controls its cycle of growth and division. Working in fission yeast, he showed that the cdc2 gene encodes a protein kinase, which ensures the cell is ready to copy its DNA and divide. Paul’s findings have broader significance since errors in cell growth and division may lead to cancer and other serious diseases.

Paul’s contributions to cell biology and cancer research were recognised with a knighthood in 1999. In addition, Paul’s endeavours relating to the discovery of cell cycle regulatory molecules saw him jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001.

Over the last thirty years, Paul has held many senior research leadership roles. In 2010, he was elected as President of the Royal Society for a five-year term. Since 2011, he has been the Director and Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute, a London-based biomedical research institute due to open in 2015.