Jean Laigret
Jean Laigret (17 August 1893 - 11 March 1966) was a French biologist born in Blois.
He was a student of the 'École principale du service de Santé de la Marine at Bordeaux, and during World War I served in the infantry. In 1915 he sustained wounds, receiving the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he defended his doctoral thesis with Contribution à la prophylaxie de la syphilis. From 1921 to 1923 he worked in a hospital at Brazzaville, Middle Congo, and subsequently becomes an assistant at the Pasteur Institute in Brazzaville. Here he works on a treatment for trypanosomiasis by testing orsanine and suramine developed by Ernest Fourneau (1872-1949).
In 1927 he is appointed head of the laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Saigon, and soon afterwards is transferred to Dakar, where he is promoted to medical officer of hygiene (1928). The following year he becomes director of the laboratory in Bamako, and in 1930 returned to France, being appointed instructor of microbiology classes at the Institut Pasteur.
In 1932 he becomes head of the laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis. Here he performs tests on a vaccine against yellow fever, using a vaccine that was produced from the brains of mice that were infected with the yellow fever virus. In 1934, based in Dakar, he administers the yellow fever vaccine to the populace on a large scale basis. The vaccine used in West Africa is deemed successful, the primary negative being reports of benign febrile reactions.
In 1935-37 he teaches classes at Faculty of Medicine of Paris. In 1941 is dismissed by the Vichy government, and becomes a lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine of Algiers, replacing Ernest Pinoy (1873-1948). In 1945 he returns to the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, and later serves as a professor of bacteriology and hygiene at the University of Strasbourg (1950-1960).
[edit] References
- France savantes, Prosopo (biography)
- Pasteur Institute Archives Repères chronologiques
- Time Magazine Mouse Brains v. Yellow Fever
