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In 2001, I was asked to represent France on the OECD1 committee examining the potential to use amphibian metamorphosis as a screening test for chemicals that might disrupt thyroid hormone signaling. Amphibian metamorphosis was chosen as a model system because the whole spectacular process of turning a tadpole into a frog is orchestrated by thyroid hormone. But the assay is not only relevant to frogs; the thyroid hormone that sculptures a frog from a tadpole is exactly the same molecule, exploiting the same molecular signaling systems, that enables human brains to develop and function correctly. Moreover, the same molecule also regulates our energy metabolism, controls our weight, and controls the functions of many organs, including the heart—hence, the importance of thyroid hormone for many aspects of human mental and physical health.
My name was put forward as a scientific expert for the OECD committee as I had been working on different aspects of thyroid hormone signaling since my thesis in Calgary, Canada, in the mid-1970s and again in Paris for more than 20 years. In between, after 4 years lecturing on physiology at the University Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco, I took a decade-long excursion into researching how membrane signaling by neurotransmitters modulates gene transcription while working at the University of Strasbourg. During this period I spent a summer in the molecular neurobiology laboratory in Cambridge, learning more molecular biology and cloning techniques. Then, after a sabbatical in the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, I had the opportunity to fulfil a dream and set up my own lab in the Natural History Museum in Paris in 1990.
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