Jean-Pierre Changeux
Biographical Information
Jean-Pierre Changeux is Professor Emeritus, Collège de France and Department of
Neurosciences, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France. At the advent of the molecular biology era,
Jean-Pierre Changeux pioneered the study of the role of conformational change in regulatory
processes. His PhD studies, carried under the supervision of Jacques Monod, provided
the experimental basis for the formal model of allosteric regulatory interactions in
bacterial regulatory enzymes, put forward in a paper that has become one of the hundred
most quoted of the world’s scientific literature. Throughout a long career, Changeux has
consistently built upon and extended his early theory, to spawn many new and flourishing
fields of investigation. His main contributions and discoveries in the course of the past 40
years are centered on the general theme of receptor mechanisms, primarily in the nervous
system. He combines approaches from supposedly disparate disciplines of pharmacology,
molecular biology and developmental biology as well as behavioral and pathological
studies, as and when required. His contributions to understanding the regulation of acetylcholine
receptors in turn contributed to understanding the nature of long-term synaptic
plasticity within neural networks. They also inspired a number of other theoreticians
and experimentalists. His seminal work on the nicotinic receptor pioneered new fields
of research in signal transduction mechanisms, molecular pharmacology and pathology
of chemical communications in the nervous system. The publication of his book Neuronal
Man: The Biology of The Mind in 1985 brought Changeux celebrity status among the
wider public. Since then he has co-authored several other books directed towards the
non-scientific public. Notably, Conversations on Mind Matter and Mathematics (1998) and
What Makes Us Think (2002) are widely acknowledged as having initiated an instructive
dialogue between the two, often-hostile disciplines of neuroscience and philosophy. Jean-
Pierre Changeux’s many academic accolades include the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medecine
in 1993, the Balzan Prize in 2001 and the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
in 2004. In April 2006 year he received the Biotechnology Achievement Award from the
University of New York School of Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of
Sciences and in 2007, received the NAS Award in the Neurosciences. |
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