Page 9 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Maier-Leibnitz and Jacrot recruited the young German and French scientists and engineers who designed and built a new generation of instruments and set up the policy that opened
up the ILL to other than neutron specialists. After his term as associate director, Jacrot left Grenoble in 1973 to spend a year in Cambridge to ‘learn’ biology convinced that there were great discoveries to be made by applying the full breadth of physical methods to biological structure analysis.
He returned to ILL as senior scientist for biology determined
to introduce the interdisciplinary physics/biology approach that also paved the way for neutron scattering in soft condensed matter. It was not an easy task but Jacrot patiently imposed structural biology on the site, first as ILL senior scientist then
as director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory outstation. He established a group in structural virology and published extensively in the field. He wrote a review of small angle scattering in biology that because of its clarity is still consulted today and visited labs to introduce neutrons to biologists in a language they could understand. He was appointed to the management team of the Life Sciences at CNRS where he contributed significantly to the development of structural biology in France. He wrote books about the relations between physics and biology and on the history of ILL. In 1980, he was awarded the Felix Robin prize of the French Physical Society for his lifetime achievement in physics.
Bernard Jacrot died peacefully in his ninetieth year on the 21st of January 2016.
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Bernard Jacrot by Joe Zaccai