Presentation of the 1995 A.N. Richards Award to François Morel

Abstract

Francois Morel was born in Geneva in 1923 as the son of a physician. He spent his childhood and received his education in that town. An early passion of his which has lasted through the years, is collecting butterflies. At school he learned Latin and Greek; however, his heart was drawn to the field of natural science. At the age of eighteen he enrolled in the Faculty of Natural Science in Geneva and two years later in the Faculty of Medicine (Table 1). Figure 1 shows Francois Morel as a student. His clinical years brought him some disappointment, because medicine, as it was taught at that time, was far away from a natural scientific background. After he got his Diploma in Medicine he decided then to go to Paris to continue his studies in Natural Science. Simultaneously, he was appointed as Biomedical Scientist at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomic (CEA) and worked with Prof. Robert Courrier at the College de France in the Laboratory of Endocrinology and Morphology on the distribution and excretion of radionucleotides (Table 2). He wrote about that time: This first contact with the French scientific world and the intellectual life in Paris was singularly to broaden my horizons and confirm my aspirations. The research which he accomplished during that period formed the basis for his doctoral thesis in medicine submitted in Geneva and entitled Measurement of capillary exchange by the use of radioactive indicators and his thesis for a doctorate in natural science, submitted at the University of Paris and entitled Endocrine regulation of water and salt metabolism in the rat using 24Na. In 1948 he married Egletine Pieyre de Mandiargues. They have five children: four daughters and one son. In 1953, when the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomic established a biological service in the laboratories in Saclay, Francois Morel was offered the leadership of a group in physiology, where he functioned as Scientific Counseler and later as Chief of the Laboratory of Physiology and Physical Chemistry. While there, he actually continued his previous scientific work (Table 2). In 1967, he became Director of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology at the College de France, a position which he held until his retirement in 1993. Francois Morel realized early that one cannot understand kidney function without knowing the function of the different heterogenous nephron segments, which the glomerular filtrate passes on its way to the ducts of Bellini. Therefore, he investigated the transport processes along the nephron using micropuncture techniques, mainly on desert rodents which produce highly concentrated urine (Table 2). Along this line his laboratory con-