[Nfb-science] FW: [accessibleimage] Jacques Le Magnen

[Robert Jaquiss]

Hello Colleagues:

 

      I thought the following article about the blind French scientist
Jacques Le Magnen would be of interest. I had not heard of this person
before.

 

Happpy Holidays,

 

Robert

 

 

 

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Subject: [accessibleimage] Jacques Le Magnen

 

Hi,

Read about Jacques Le Magnen in Gary Taube's Good Calories, Bad Calories. In
anycase if you are not familiar with this scientist am sending a link. He
became blind at the age of 13.




One of the pioneers in research on olfaction and taste, and on the
regulation of water and food intake left us on Thursday, May 23, 2002, at
the age of 85. Jacques Le Magnen was a disciple of the famous French
physiologist Henri Piéron at the Collège de France, and from 1949 till 1989
developed his own laboratory of sensory and behavioral neurophysiology in
this same renowned institution. 

His early work was dedicated to the study of olfaction, and more especially
(but not only!) to the influence of hormonal status and particularly sex
hormones on variations in olfactory sensitivity. The originality of his
approach and the precision of his experiments, executed with very primitive
olfactometry, immediately assured him a position as one of the leading
personalities in the field of olfaction. He always retained a keen interest
in olfaction and was a mentor to many young scientists, both in and outside
his laboratory, who wanted to study olfactory phenomena, even when the main
orientation of his work shifted towards the study of the regulation of food
and water intake. To this latter field of research he made a number of
invaluable contributions. 

Beginning in 1950, Jacques Le Magnen put forward a series of revolutionary
concepts. His ideas have inspired and still inspire generations of
scientists. He was the first to develop instruments that made it possible to
register food and water intake in the rat across the whole 24 h day, and to
show how the behavior and its determinants change under the influence of
circadian cycles. During the phase of activity (the night in the rat),
intake permits the build up ofbodily reserves which will be used in the
resting phase, during which consumption is reduced to a minimum. This
day/night alternation is one of the cornerstones of energetic and
hydromineral regulation. During the daily active period, meals alternate
with fasting in response to metabolic signals that are generated by the
acquisition of the ingesta and by the composition of bodily reserves. In all
this, the role of the sensory characteristics of food, olfactory of course,
but also gustatory and visual, was not forgotten. In what he called
`learning of palatability', Jacques Le Magnen showed how the sensory
characteristics of food transform themselves into a complex conditioned
stimulus that guides behavior, permits the formation of food preferences and
aversions, and determines the size of a meal depending on the anticipated
metabolic consequences of ingestion. Furthermore, his laboratory confirmed
that the same sensory and metabolic factors also function in humans. 

Finally, he was also interested in problems concerning human alcohol
consumption, and in order to study them he created an animal model that was
addicted to ethanol which he used during 30 years of research. 

Jacques Le Magnen continued to publish scientific work right to the end of
his life. His bibliography can be found in his last invited publication in
an international journal, entitled `My scientific life: 40 years at the
Collège de France' (2001, Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev., 25: 375–394). Thus, the
richness of his ideas and his enormous knowledge of the fields that were
important to him are readily available. 

Jacques Le Magnen also played an important role in the organization of
research. As a Research Director of the Centre National de Recherche
Scientifique and of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, he played an
important role in the evaluation of research and scientific development in
France. As co-founder and first president of the European Chemoreception
Research Organization, he had a lasting impact on the development of the
coordination of chemo-sensory research in the world. 

But above all, his students and all those who have known him will remember
him by his exceptional courage and dedication to science. At the age of 13
he contracted an encephalitis, as a result of which he lost his eyesight.
His blindness, however, did not stop him from pursuing a scientific career
characterized by brilliant ideas and experiments. He was an indefatigable
worker, a true scholar and a lover of refined music. His intellectual
activity did not end with his retirement from the Collège de France in 1989
and he continued to write to the last. 

His students and his friends were always struck by his phenomenal scientific
and encyclopedic memory. Jacques Le Magnen knew everything: who had
demonstrated what, by what means and under what circumstances. The most
astonishing feats of this memory were his lively and very visual
descriptions of cities he had visited, but of course had never seen
directly. He saw these cities through the eyes of Madame Le Magnen, his
admirable and devoted companion, who was always at his side wherever he
traveled. 

Jacques Le Magnen was Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and Doctor Honoris
Causa of the Universties of Lausanne and Utrecht. 

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/2/85.full