It was revealed to the general public during the Covid-19 epidemic. Didier Raoult, the former director of the Mediterranean University Hospital Institute (IHU), returns to the front of the media scene. Retired since September, the scientist is leaving his autobiography published by Michel Lafon as revealed by La Provence.
Throughout the 329 pages, the microbiologist looks back on his life, his career and his childhood. “In my family, this family of heroes, I found my place […] I was the fourth generation of an officer of the Legion of Honor. When Napoleon created it, he said that following two or three generations the title was definitively acquired by the family. Which corresponds to a title of nobility.
Later in the book, Didier Raoult also talks regarding his youth: “At home, the ego is indeed oversized. I see it, sometimes I regret it, because as far as I can remember, it has often aroused the worst jealousy towards me”. And to complete: “So I had to wait until I was a medical student and to touch ethology to understand that this interest that I aroused in spite of myself was undoubtedly linked to the fact that I was an alpha male”.
“I named a thousand microbes”
For a time acclaimed, he was then widely criticized by the medical community during the global epidemic of Covid-19: “France has always maintained an ambivalence, giving birth to pure geniuses within it before condemning them to a kind of madness destructive”. He evokes the new coronavirus but returns little to the controversies linked to his positions in favor of hydroxychloroquine. “We were right,” he says.
To conclude his book, Didier Raoult writes these few lines: “I named a thousand microbes […] of which everyone knows and will know that it is we who baptized them while all those who annoy me will have disappeared in the dustbins of History”.
