Jerome Lejeune and the dignity of human Life

This month, we also celebrate the birthday of Jérôme Lejeune (13 June 1926 – 3 April 1994), a French pediatrician and geneticist, best known for discovering the link of diseases to chromosome abnormalities, especially Down Syndrome to an extra copy of chromosome 21; a discovery he made in 1958. In the next years, he observed with greatest concern that his discovery of trisomy 21 would lead to a medical holocaust, national health systems giving huge funds to track down and eliminate these children before they could be born. As Catholic and physician, he could not agree. In 1969, after receiving the Allan prize granted by the American Society of Human Genetics, Lejeune gave a talk to his colleagues which concluded by explicitly questioning the morality of abortion, an unpopular viewpoint in the profession. In a letter to his wife, Lejeune wrote “today, I lost my Nobel prize in Medicine”. He later became President of the newly founded Pontifical Academy for Life and carefully drafted its bylaws and the oath of the Servants of Life that each member of the Academy must take.

Update 03 April 2024: Dr. Lejeune first encountered Cardinal Karol Wojtyla in Krakow in 1975 during a conference focused on the beginning of life. Several years later, Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II. Throughout his papacy, their paths crossed on multiple occasions in Rome. Notably, Dr. Lejeune and his wife shared a meal with the Pontiff on 13 May 1981, when an attempt was made on the Pope’s life. Following the scientist’s passing, John Paul II paid homage to his legacy by visiting his gravesite in 1997 during World Youth Day in Paris.

Sources: Wikipedia, MercatorNet, comments to our FB post

Augustin Louis Cauchy: I believe in the Deity of Christ

On 23 May 1857, the French mathematician Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) passed away in Sceaux, France. His research provided the foundation for the modern period of rigor in analysis. He was one of the first to state and prove theorems of calculus rigorously, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He almost singlehandedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra. A profound mathematician, Cauchy had a great influence over his contemporaries and successors. His writings range widely in mathematics and mathematical physics.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) notes: “Cauchy was an admirable type of the true Catholic savant. A great and indefatigable mathematician, he was at the same time a loyal and devoted son of the Church. He made public profession of his faith and found his greatest pleasure and recreation in works of zeal and charity.”

In his book “Considérations sur les ordres religieux, adressées aux amis des sciences” (1844), he said:

“I am a Christian, that is, I believe in the divinity of Christ, as did Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Fermat, Leibniz, Pascal, Grimaldi, Euler, Guldin; Boscovich, Gerdil, as did all the great astronomers, physicist and geometricians of past ages.”

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Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03457a.htm

Quote translated from French in: Julio Antonio Gonzalo (2008). The Intelligible Universe: An Overview of the Last Thirteen Billion Years

Pierre-Joseph Pelletier: Chlorophyll and Quinine

Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (22 March 1788 – 19 July 1842) was a French chemist who helped found the chemistry of alkaloids.
Pelletier was professor at and, from 1832, director of the School of Pharmacy, Paris. In 1817, in collaboration with the chemist Joseph-Bienaimé Caventou (1795-1877), he isolated chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that is essential to the process of photosynthesis.

He was also one of the pioneers of the study of plant alkaloid chemistry. Alkaloids are organic compounds that induce various effects in medicine, including painkillers and respiratory stimulants. Together with Caventou, they set up to solve the mystery of “cinchona bark”. In 1817, they tackled the problem that had baffled scientists for decades- wrestling the secrets of Peruvian barks that were so useful in malaria. After sweating out for months they isolated from the yellow bark, a sticky, pale yellow gum that could not be induced to crystallise. The gum was soluble in acid, alcohol, and ether and highly effective in malaria. The two men named the new chemical quinine after quinaquina the name given by Peruvian Indians to the bark. The announcement was made in 1820. Caventou and Pelletier prepared pure salts of quinine, had them tested clinically, and set up manufacturing facilities. They refused any profit from their discovery. Instead of patenting the extraction process they published the method of separation of quinine and cinchonine from the cinchona barks so that anyone could manufacture quinine. They received many honours; the most lucrative was Prix Montyon of 10 thousand Francs awarded by the French Institute of Science.

They also discovered brucine, strychnine, and veratrine. Some of these compounds soon found medicinal uses. Such applications marked the beginning of the gradual shift away from the use of crude plant extracts and toward the use of natural and synthetic compounds found in nature or formulated by the chemist. In 1823 Pelletier published analyses of several alkaloids, thus providing a basis for alkaloid chemistry. He also did important studies of other compounds, including caffeine, piperine, and picrotoxin.

He had five children with his first wife, Aglae-Genevieve Vergez, who died in 1830. He remarried on December 1832 with Esther Courtin. As his colleague Augustin-Louis Cauchy testifies, Pelletier was a convinced Catholic.

Sources:
JV Pai-Dhungat, Caventou, Pelletier & – History Of Quinine, Journal of the association of physicians of india • vol 63 • march, 2015

Dr BS Kakkilaya, Saga of Malaria Treatment

Georges Dillemann, La vie de Joseph Pelletier

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier