Who was Gerard Berger?

"Gérard was a discoverer and therefore ahead of his peers, never putting himself forward or being a careerist, like a number of the great researchers he was part of. His thought remained free to the end."

Guy Girault
Researcher and colleague of Gérard at CEA

Résumé

Gérard Berger was an engineer at the ESPCI (School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris), graduated in 1960.

Researcher at the CNRS from 1962 to 1967, he offered his services on the DNase inhibitor in 1967. He became a research engineer at CEA from 1967 to 1998.

Biography

His childhood

My husband, Gérard Berger, was born in Saint-Maurice in Val-de-Marne on June 7, 1938, to an accountant father and a milliner mother. The paternal family, lived in Maisons-Alfort in a pavilion near that of the maternal family rue des Marais. These marshes were practically at the foot of the houses and teeming with life.  His grandfather fished there pike, carp and tench...

His father was mobilized in 1939 and taken prisoner in 1940. His mother and paternal grandmother worked. It was therefore Respin's maternal grandparents who took care of Gérard. His grandfather Joseph taught him to read. A carpenter by trade, he made wooden toys for him. Growing up, Gerard was very attracted to the marshes. With his friends he spent a lot of time chasing frogs, salamanders and various insects. His predilection for bugs and nature observation came from there. In the summer they went on holiday in Creuse where they visited the family but also went fishing in the Gartempe, a beautiful river full of fish.

He had no problem with school, he was doing well. At 10, he entered the 6th year of the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris; he continued his studies there until the Baccalauréat. That's when he became interested in science. He promised to work later on cancer and the structure of matter. His book "Le vide, l'énergie et la matière" was thus already in germ at that time. He was experimenting in the garden and house, buying chemicals at the local drugstore. This did not reassure either his parents or the neighbours, who saw plumes of smoke and explosions. He was lucky not to injure himself, which was not the case for some of the chemistry apprentices he knew.

The year 1954 ended in drama for Gerard and the whole family. Albert, his father, died in a moped accident. The situation changed, but the family got together so that Gerard could continue his studies.

His training


In 1955 he entered the Lycée Chaptal in Paris in preparatory class at the École de Physique et Chimie de Paris (ESPCI).  Gérard presented himself relaxed to the competitions, knowing that 2 years were most often necessary to integrate a Grande Ecole of engineers. It worked for him and he was received the first time! He was in the 75th class from 1956 to 1960. During the summer holidays he did internships in companies, at the time rather well paid.  He did an internship at the CEA where he met Mr Roux, head of the Photosynthesis Laboratory, who later directed his career.

At the end of his studies, in the middle of the Algerian war, Gérard resigned his suspension, refusing to be assigned to the Army Scientific Service to work on combat gases, which would have been contrary to his ethics. He was sent directly to Algeria, where he made his classes, refused to be an officer or non-commissioned officer so as not to be forced to do things he did not approve of. He thus remained almost 2 years soldier of 2nd class, and finished brigadier some time before his release. He was not confronted with dangerous situations but he narrowly escaped the machine-gunning of a café which he had judged too crowded to enter it... Algeria had become independent and at the end of September 1962 he re-embarked for France. Upon his arrival he contracted hepatitis A which earned him 1 month hospitalization in Val de Grace.

It was right after that episode that we met. I already knew her maternal grandmother Eugénie Respin and her mother Suzanne, whom I often saw on the suburban train and whose sad face I had noticed, because of the concern to know her son in danger in Algeria. We were married in 1963.

His professional life: from CNRS to CEA

I taught Natural Sciences at the lycée Fénelon in Paris and Gérard had been hired at the CNRS for a PhD thesis at the Institut de la Cellule Normale et Cancéreuse directed by Miss Lebreton, at Villejuif.

We lived a few months in Paris then in Maisons-Alfort. Our first child, Catherine, was born in 1964. Gérard continued his PhD thesis on the DNase Inhibitor but he said "I had the impression more and more that the goal sought in this institute was not to find any cancer therapy, but to study the mechanisms of the normal cell. And yet we saw the deaths of Gustave Roussy Hospital every day... Fortunately Jenner and Pasteur did not try to understand all immunology before trying vaccination! »

I was received at CAPES in Natural Sciences in 1966, while Gérard defended his thesis. Doctor of Science, he would have liked to study cell differentiation, but this was not possible. After the birth of Laurent, our 2nd child, that same year 1966, we considered leaving the Paris region to live in the South of France.

Mr Roux then convinced him to apply to the Radioagronomy Department of the Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires de Cadarache. In this service food preservation by irradiation was studied. The material used was corn and Gérard had to identify the products induced by starch irradiation.

In 1967 we moved to Manosque (Alpes de Haute Provence). These were 8 beautiful years in the middle of olive trees and Géraldine, our 3rd child, was born in 1971.

The return to the Paris region took place in 1975. Gérard had to wait 8 years in the Frédéric Joliot Department of the Hôpital d'Orsay. He developed radiopharmaceuticals that doctors then had to inject into patients, not for therapeutic purposes, but for research. In 1983 he finally got the job he was hoping for in Mr Roux's Biophysics Department in Saclay. He carried out numerous biochemical studies on plant proteins and protein subunits involved in the biochemical reactions of photosynthesis: separation of proteins, innovations in separation techniques, measurements made on liquid chromatography metal columns containing various resins subjected to various aqueous solvents and eluted by pumps ensuring a certain pressure (HPLC), gel filtration or ion exchange, measurements making it possible to determine the mode of enzymatic activity of a protein, such as the measurement of ATPasic activity. Gérard used a lot these columns of exchanges or filtration He did a lot of research and contributed to a lot of work.