The walk to lunch in Paris with the head of one of France’s most prestigious research establishments takes me under a jagged arch topped by feathered dinosaurs. The scene is part of a Jurassic light show at the Jardin des Plantes, a cradle of discovery where I am meeting Yasmine Belkaid, president of the Pasteur Institute. Beyond looms the Beaux-Arts style National Museum of Natural History where Henri Becquerel stumbled upon natural radioactivity in 1896, after noticing how uranium salts fogged a photographic plate.
This sinuous scientific story and the accompanying January cold are powerful appetisers for my meeting with Belkaid at Les Belles Plantes café-brasserie. She tells me she chose the place because it symbolises the “position of science” and the “complex ecosystem” in which it is intertwined.
It is a sign that this meal will be heavy with portentous imagery and context. Hours after our lunch has taken place, Donald Trump begins his second presidential term with far-reaching changes to institutions at the heart of Belkaid’s world. The US National Institutes of Health, where she used to work, is in a legal battle over planned cuts of billions of dollars to research grants. Material related to gender and racial diversity has disappeared from the websites of the NIH and other scientific institutions.
Trump has announced the US exit from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. His administration has suspended much international aid funding, disrupting the fight against diseases from Aids to Ebola. Robert F Kennedy Jr, who was this week confirmed as health and human services secretary, is a long-standing vaccine sceptic.
It feels like the Pasteur Institute, where Belkaid, 56, took over last year, is at the frontline of a global battle over science. The organisation was founded in 1887 by the French scientific polymath and vaccination pioneer Louis Pasteur with the goal of improving human health. Its international network of more than 30 institutions in 25 countries places it at the heart of the struggle against disease threats. These include the rising risk of further pandemics, driven by factors such as climate change, pathogen drug resistance and virus spread from animals to humans.
Belkaid is in no doubt about the scale of the challenge she and like-minded researchers face. “Science is in danger,” she says, citing falls in the funding, trust and societal priority it receives. “We are completely forgetting the reason science is there — and that it is something that needs to be cherished and protected.”
We are the restaurant’s first arrivals and are quickly installed at a small round table. The plant life extends to the walls, which are decorated with a busy swirl of tree branches and animals including chameleons against a turquoise background. I notice that Belkaid’s floral dress is a near-perfect colour match. She jokes later that she has gone for the “camouflage” look.
Belkaid skips a starter and chooses the lightest option on the menu, a vegetable-based fusion bowl including hummus, red lentils and pomegranate. I go for the rigatoni with a sauce of pecorino and Sarawak pepper, plus spinach leaves and walnuts.
The gardens beyond our table represent the “origins of medicine”, Belkaid says. Some plants have natural therapeutic qualities that have been known for millennia, with the knowledge often held by women, she adds. She segues into an anecdote of how her early scientific inspirations came during Alpine walks with her grandmother, a pharmacist. The young Yasmine observed species from poisonous mushrooms to dandelions, known in French as pissenlits — wet the bed — because of their diuretic effects.
“Learning that plants can have medicinal properties is probably one of the things that had [the] most influence on my trajectory,” Belkaid says. “It was one of my entries into how you can transform elements around you into cure and treatment.”
Belkaid is the daughter of a languages professor mother and a father who was an independence campaigner and politician in Algeria, where she was born and raised. The dynamics of science and politics have always been closely connected. “I was so lucky to be in an environment where the meaning of what you do, the meaning of how you engage yourself is so fundamentally important,” she says. “For me, science and politics — all of that is entwined. You make active choices about how you’re going to commit your time and your energy — and they are aligned with what you believe in profoundly.”
My pasta is welcome comfort food, every warming mouthful an antidote to the residual bone chill from my garden promenade. Belkaid is eating sporadically since she is doing most of the talking. I resolve to expand my questions to give her a chance to catch up.
As Belkaid was studying for her PhD at the Pasteur Institute, Algeria slipped into a civil war between the government and Islamist forces that would last a decade. In 1995, her father Aboubekr, a former interior minister, was assassinated. Belkaid felt she could not return to Algeria after this “profoundly traumatic” event. At the same time, there were few obvious opportunities in France for a young female scientist of north African heritage.
Belkaid, who had a young son at the time, decided to “reinvent” herself. She moved to the US, where she would remain for almost three decades and eventually become director of the NIH Center for Human Immunology.
“In retrospect, what was I thinking?” she laughs. “I didn’t know the person I was going to work for, I didn’t know English — and somehow, none of that seemed difficult in the face of what we had experienced. I left with two suitcases and my son and we just made a life for ourselves there.”
Belkaid’s central interest is the interactions of microbes with the human immune system. She says a crucial development has been a shift beyond viewing the field simply through “war imagery”, like a “weapon that comes and attacks”. Now there is a much more sophisticated understanding of the continuous role it plays in keeping “balance” in the body’s organs, from the guts to the skin.
Belkaid sits on an advisory group that has helped push the Gates Foundation towards making gut microbes a leading area of international research. Studies suggest good digestive bacteria health helps nutrient absorption and disease resistance in undernourished children. Other research points to nutrient overconsumption as a potential source of increased risk of neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
I ask Belkaid what she makes of the rise of consumer health businesses, offering gut health as a gateway to broader wellbeing. She says progress is exciting, but warns against making claims that outstrip the evidence. “I’m very confident over the next 10 years we’re going to see extraordinary nutritional products on the market,” she says. “But this is early stage. We’re not yet at the stage where we can pretend that we can control these microbes.”
At the Pasteur Institute, Belkaid will continue to pursue her research passion of maternal-child health, in addition to her considerable management duties. It is part of the organisation’s broader focus on the health of the young and old, as well as the origins of diseases and the impact of climate change. Belkaid brings with her an additional desire to improve the diversity of science in both its practitioners and the data it produces.
It seems a triumphant return to France for Belkaid, the Pasteur Institute’s second female head. She is a face of the government’s “Make It Iconic. Choose France” campaign to promote the country to business and visitors, along with celebrities including the footballer Kylian Mbappé. “It’s actually very touching the way I have been welcomed,” she says with a smile. “We need scientists to be out there, to be visible, to be recognised.”
Menu
Les Belles Plantes
47 Rue Cuvier, 75005, Paris
Bowl verde €18.50
Rigatoni with pecorino €17.50
Espresso x2 €3.20
Total €42.40
Belkaid has still not finished her greens bowl, but she places her cutlery to indicate to the waiter she is done. She shows no desire for a dessert and asks if I would like a coffee — another medicinal plant of distinction. I figure it is probably for the best to spurn a crème brûlée or tiramisu sugar high, after all our talk about the importance of a good diet.
Instead of a sweet treat, I shift the chat to Trump. Belkaid exhales when I mention his name, reinforcing the point with a “let’s stay calm” downward movement with her hands. I ask her if she is worried that the returning president and his political soulmates internationally will attack health institutions and their work, as happened during the Covid pandemic. Her remarks will prove prescient even sooner than she may have feared.
“This is a very difficult moment for me”, she says. “I lived in the States for 30 years. I worked in the National Institutes of Health, which was a direct target of all of that. The consequences it can have are not just for the States — it’s for all of us, for the world.”
Science is a “bystander” in a wider public distrust in institutions, Belkaid argues. “I think it’s not that people don’t believe in science — they just don’t believe in the system. So we can play a role — but until this trust is rebuilt at a higher level, we alone can do very little.”
What researchers can do is use “the right framework to communicate”, she says. While they cannot “become completely emotional”, neither can they “remain robot scientists” churning out “numbers on numbers”.
Belkaid agrees with me that researchers need to become better at being open about risks — and at conveying how the dangers of spurning vaccines far outweigh those of having them. She recalls how the most effective argument she made to non-scientific staff at NIH who had doubts about the Covid jab was drawn from her own personal experience. “The one thing that seemed to work was when I said, ‘You know what? I made the choice to vaccinate my children, as a scientist’. And this somehow resonated more than the rest.”
I ask Belkaid how she sees the treatment of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, while she was there. Fauci paid warm tribute to Belkaid when she left, calling her a “scientific superstar and a visionary leader”. Fauci was a high-profile member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, but became a hate figure for some Trump supporters when his advice at times contradicted the president’s.
There is a legitimate debate to be had over Fauci’s record in office, but criticisms of him have spilled into threats of violence. President Joe Biden issued a pre-emptive pardon for Fauci during his last hours in the White House; days later it was reported that Trump had ended Fauci’s federal security detail.
Fauci’s situation is a terrible one for a scientist who has spent his life putting “infectious disease at the forefront of research”, Belkaid says.
“I saw him in DC recently, surrounded by bodyguards, receiving death threats to this day,” she says, with feeling. “It was an extremely sad moment to see that. We live in a world that has reached extremes that I think we have become way too comfortable with.”
The Trump administration’s broader retreat from some established international public health efforts has echoes elsewhere. Figures such as Sania Nishtar, chief executive of Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, have said factors including economic pressures and conflict spending are constraining donors.
Funding of science has failed to keep pace with increasing costs, Belkaid argues. France itself has “chronically underinvested” in research, she adds.
The trend is disturbing at a time of ever more pressing need, Belkaid says. Collective engagement is essential in an area of growing global health threats, from potential pandemics posed by bird flu or other new pathogens. “Who is going to pay the price?” for underfunding, Belkaid asks rhetorically. “There is such a crisis in so many directions that we are forgetting the essential,” she says. “The essential is: you are not alone on this planet.”
We turn to the extraordinary technological advances powering a new age of scientific discovery. They give us hope, but they have a dark side. Like the belladonna in the Jardin des Plantes, they can kill or cure.
Belkaid was one of a group of almost 40 distinguished scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, who published a hair-raising study in December. It examined the potential effects of progress in synthetic biology one day making it possible to create “mirror bacteria”.
These would have the same chemical composition as naturally occurring microbes but differ structurally because they are reflections of each other and thus non-superimposable, just like human hands. This chemical phenomenon is called chirality — from the Greek for “hand” — and, in a symphonious twist, it was first identified by Louis Pasteur.
This seemingly small tweak to the structure could have a terrifying impact, Belkaid and her fellow authors argued. The immune systems of people, other animals and plants would not be adapted to deal with these differently configured human-made bacteria. The manufactured microbes might simply overrun the defences of Earth’s living organisms.
“It sounds like science fiction, I know that,” Belkaid says. “We are postulating that this could have catastrophic consequences on the environment and human health.”
Belkaid puts a positive spin on the paper, casting it as an example of scientists getting ahead of the game. She and her co-authors have called for rules to stop mirror life being made. They urge management of a potential threat before it appears rather than after the fact, as has all too often happened with emergent technologies.
“Scientists are viewed as these soulless creatures that will just follow data and create monsters and pathogens and whatever,” Belkaid says. “This is not true science. Scientists are very committed to the ethics of what they do.”
By the time the bill arrives, we have been through the entire lunch lifecycle: only a handful of other diners remain. It is time for me to retrace my steps through the Jardin des Plantes’ circuitous science journey.
Immersion in this place of evolutionary deep time and epochal research breakthroughs prompts a final existential question to Belkaid before we part. Earlier, in the Jurassic light show, I’d observed a model ornithomimus, a speedy dinosaur named for its birdlike feet, that had fallen off its perch in a foreshadowing of the giant reptiles’ extinction event. In a modern world under grave threat, can science save us from a similar fate, I ask — and would we be right to hope it could do so?
“Well, what else is going to save us — honestly, what else?” Belkaid shoots back immediately, pointing for support to the scientific achievements of the past century. “Look at what we can accomplish if we put our energy and our collective will towards solutions. We are bizarrely unstoppable — and we are incredibly resilient.”
Michael Peel is the FT’s science editor
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