I made a discovery that won the Nobel Prize, but it was my boss who won the prize

Most people only think about fruit flies when they forget to eat a piece that is already rotting.

But for French researcher Bruno Lemaitre, the fruit fly has been an obsession since the first time he saw it under a microscope.

“When I started in biology, we usually studied cells or molecules, but when I put this little fly under the microscope, I thought it was really beautiful and interesting,” he told the program Outlook from the BBC.

His obsessive curiosity about this insect led Lemaitre to make an important scientific discovery: how genes known as toll-like receptors are responsible for identifying an infection in the body and activating the immune response to combat it.

As expected, the discovery generated controversy and repercussion in the scientific community and his work ended up being chosen as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2011.

But instead of Lemaitre receiving the award, or being included as one of the main authors of the work, all the credit was given to whoever wrote the scientific study: the head of the unit where Lemaitre worked, Jules Hoffman.

Today, Lemaitre dedicates himself to studying narcissistic personalities and wrote a book on the subject, whose title in Portuguese would be An Essay on Science and Narcissism. He says he is at peace with what happened.

But getting to this point was not easy.

Interest in everything

Lemaitre remembers that when he was a child he wanted to be an encyclopedist: to be able to learn everything he could about the world around him.

“I was also curious to understand. Scientific knowledge interested me a lot. At first I wanted to learn everything about astronomy, physics and biology. But, at some point, I realized that it would be impossible, that I had to focus on one thing and the flies -fruits were the object of my passion”, says Lemaitre.

Growing up as a shy child in a home with many brothers and sisters, Lemaitre says he spent a lot of time collecting things, including insects.

“Somehow, my passion for insects brought me into contact with other people and gave me some recognition within my family. My parents were proud of me, some friends told me they were fascinated by my room, which was full of rocks and insects” .

His skill took him to Paris, where he learned other aspects of science.

‘Power struggle’

For Professor Lemaitre, it is still difficult to talk about what he found when he arrived in the city: “How can I say? The research structure in France and French universities is relatively complicated, with a large number of administrative layers.”

“I discovered that professors don’t necessarily choose the best students or that professors often had their wives hired by the lab. Many cases of favoritism. Maybe I was too sensitive to this, but I quickly felt that academic research was not the simple pursuit of knowledge”, he says.

“It was a struggle for power, for jobs, for recognition. I was suddenly a little naive when I encountered this very human aspect of research because, after all, this is in every human dimension and in every community.”

In the midst of this environment, he found a group of researchers who needed an intern to collaborate on studies of fruit flies.

He continued to delve deeper into his new passion, working with Michael Ashburner’s team at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD.

Furthermore, at this time he met his wife, of Lebanese origin, and started a family, which required that his search for his next job be limited to vacancies in the vicinity of Paris.

Flies and men

There are about 1,500 species of Drosophila flies, which we call fruit flies. It is an animal that evolved to benefit from the fruits we grow and has been the star of several Nobel Prizes.

So much so that the Nobel Foundation recognizes its role: “Drosophila melanogaster is used in laboratories around the world and has been an integral part of the work of many Nobel laureates.”

“Drosophila have many advantages in the laboratory. They have short gestation times and are easy and inexpensive to reproduce. In fact, Drosophila are so easy to reproduce that they were generated on a space shuttle to understand how spaceflight could affect the system human immune system”, he explains.

When Professor Lemaitre went to work in a small laboratory on the outskirts of Paris run by scientist Jules Hoffman, he says he “was researching the immune system of flies, but without looking at the genetic component.”

“Genetics was my area of ​​knowledge and I knew it had been very powerful in understanding other issues. Then I fell in love, I said to myself ‘here you can discover something’.”

“You need to understand that science always has a collective aspect. You will never be the first person to work on something and there will always be individuals who will influence you”, he explains.

“But there is always room for an individual who can compile the information in a new way. For me “it was understanding how fruit flies responded to infections using genetics.”

Discovery

Although the laboratory did not have much recognition, Lemaitre was content with the great attraction it represented for him to study how flies defended themselves from infection. But his first year in the lab was filled with “necessary failures.”

Lemaitre says that, during these months of failures, the laboratory lost interest in the genetics team and he was left working with a colleague, often discussing the discoveries among themselves, without necessarily discussing them with his superiors.

He says that the director of the institute, Jules Hoffman, gave the teams some autonomy and remained on trips outside the city, raising funds for the institute.

When Lemaitre discovered that, by removing the toll receptors from some flies, their immune system was no longer able to identify an infection and they died, he realized he had found something important.

“I would say that in that paper I played a leadership role. You have to understand that the discovery of toll receptors was not a ‘eureka!’ where someone saw how everything worked from the beginning.”

“Tolls were discovered by researchers in Tübingen, Germany. The molecular characterization was done by an important scientist in the field called Catherine Anderson. My part and that of my team was to show the role of tolls in the immune response.”

Lemaitre reported the results to the head of the institute, Jules Hoffman, who took on the task of writing the research given his extensive experience with the scientific community.

“At first I wrote the results with the help of my colleague, but then my boss, who wrote better, played a more important role. I understood that when you have problems with writing, someone can inject some style into the discovery, that’s important .”

The study was published in a medical journal known as Cell.

The Nobel

Fifteen years later, the study of the role of tolls in the immune response opened the door for other scientists to begin studying this mechanism in mammals.

Lemaitre had left Hoffman’s laboratory to found his own study center and there was still uncertainty in the scientific community about who would receive credit for the discovery.

That’s when the Nobel Prize announced that the winner of the Medicine prize was Jules Hoffman.

“You have to understand that these Nobel prizes have a political side. By giving a Nobel for work on the fruit fly, they were validating the work in the area in which I worked, so I was relieved when I found out about the prize.”

“But at the same time I was frustrated, hurt.”

“I felt that I had contributed more than him (to the research) and he received the Nobel, although he helped make it visible and contributed his knowledge to the development of the laboratory.”

The program Outlook contacted Jules Hoffman, who categorically denied “having appropriated anyone else’s work or having been intimately involved with Lemaitre’s work.”

On the contrary, he said he was happy to hear about the scientist’s progress and said he had two chief researchers who helped him stay up to date with what was happening with his more than 50 scientists.

As for the experiments with flies, he recognized that they had been carried out directly by Lemaitre.

In fact, during his award acceptance speech, Hoffman mentioned Lemaitre’s name, but the scientist says it wasn’t enough.

With the announcement of the award, Lemaitre says he started receiving calls of support from colleagues, and remembers one in particular.

“I was contacted by an Englishman who told me he had been an adviser to the Nobel Prize and admitted that that prize raised a lot of doubts, that not everyone was satisfied with the nomination of Jules Hoffman, that he was not always seen as a researcher, but as a figure who gave visibility (to the research)”.

“He encouraged me to write a blog to explain my contribution to the discovery process. I published the blog and it was a very stressful time in my life. I didn’t have the strength to claim full authorship, as several people were given credit, but I wrote to reveal the truth about research.”

The publication generated controversy in the scientific community and put an end to the relationship between Hoffman and Lemaitre. But for Lemaitre it was necessary.

“In the end, I even received some recognition, I’m a professor at a university in Switzerland, but there are those who don’t receive any recognition,” says Lemaitre.

He says that delving deeper into the psychological analysis of narcissistic personalities gave him some understanding of the situation he went through.

“When you go through an experience like this, you need to explore other areas of science, like psychology, to understand it better. It brings a little peace. And I received some of my recognition, despite my frustration.”

Although he is a recognized scientist, he says he wonders what would have happened if he had acted differently.

“I’ve always wondered one thing: whether the normal attitude of someone in my position would be to modestly accept that their boss has earned all the recognition for their work and wait their turn.”

“It was good, but I could have ended up paying the price. Who knows.”