Didier Raoul ( Fr. Didier Raoult ; March 13, 1952 , Dakar , Senegal ) - French infectious diseases doctor and microbiologist . He and his team discovered more than sixty new types of viruses, in particular Mimivirus . He is one of the 99 most quoted microbiologists in the world and one of 73 of the highest paid French scientists. He is a leading global specialist in Q fever and Whipple's disease . He is also on the list of 400 most cited biomedical authors in the world.
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Content
Biography
Didier Raul was born on March 13, 1952 in Dakar , USA . Father was a military doctor, mother is a nurse. In 1961 he moved to Marseille with his parents. In 1970, he joined the ship. Married since 1982 to Natasha Kane, a psychiatrist by profession. They have two children. He studied at a medical school. He graduated from the residency and received a doctorate. For some time he worked as a doctor in Tahiti . At this time, he began to specialize in the field of infectious diseases. Then he worked in the USA. Invented a method of cultivating rickettsia for research. In 1983, he founded the Infectious Diseases Laboratory at the Hôpital de la Timone hospital in Marseille. More than 200 people work in his laboratory, including 86 scientists and doctors who publish an average of 325 articles a year and have filed more than 50 patents.
He received a grant for the construction of the Institut Hospitalo Universitaire Méditerranée Infection in Marseille (73 million euros). The institute opened in early 2017. He is engaged in the study of infectious diseases, carries out diagnostics, research and teaching activities.
Key Discoveries
Professor Raul’s team was the first to detect gigantic viruses. In 2003, Raul co-authored the discovery of the mimivirus . The giant viruses also include Marseillevirus and Faustoviruses , which are discovered by Raul.
Since the 1990s, Raul and his team have discovered and described about 96 new pathogenic bacteria and studied their effects on humans. Two bacteria were named after him: Raoultella planticola and Rickettsia raoultii .
He made a significant contribution to the study of rickettsia . Learned to cultivate rickettsia. He determined that they are transmitted by lice, fleas and ticks, and some species by mosquitoes. His team was the first to determine the role of the Bartonella bacteria in the development of endocarditis . Developed effective methods for the diagnosis and treatment of Q fever . For the first time in the world, the bacterium Tropheryma whipplei , which is the causative agent of Whipple's disease, was isolated and cultivated in his laboratory. He conducted research that allowed creating new effective methods of treating Whipple's disease.
His laboratory operates in the paleomicrobiology industry. His team developed an original method for extracting DNA from the pulp of the tooth of people who had died long ago, by which they determined that the cause of the plague in Marseille in the 18th century was also the bacterium “ Yersinia pestis ”, which caused the epidemic in the 14th century. Didier Raul’s team also revealed that Justinian’s plague was also associated with Yersinia pestis. These methods also made it possible to discover the causes of the death of Napoleon’s army soldiers during the retreat from Russia, after investigating the mass graves discovered in Vilnius .
Since 1999, his laboratory discovered the bacterial genome 24.
Notes
- ↑ Who's Who in France - Paris : 1953. - ISSN 0083-9531
- ↑ https://mediaserver.unige.ch/play/84066
Links
- Soutenances de thèse | Faculté de Médecine . medecine.univ-amu.fr . Date of appeal April 25, 2017.
- Liste de résultats (Fr.) . bases-brevets.inpi.fr . Date of appeal April 25, 2017.
- Incubation de start-ups - IHU Méditerranée Infection (Fr.) (link not available) . www.mediterranee-infection.com . Date of treatment April 25, 2017. Archived April 26, 2017.
- Didier Raoult, a voluntary researcher, Les Échos (October 29, 2008), p. 13.