Happy Birthday to Jerome Lejeune

        Conversing with Jérôme Lejeune

        In June 1978, I drove Dr. Jérôme Lejeune from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, where he was to give a major address at an international conference.  I knew Dr. Lejeune only by reputation: pediatrician specializing in the treatment of children with chromosomal anomalies and renowned geneticist who had discovered the cause of Down’s syndrome some 20 years earlier.  At the time I met him, he was professor of Genetics at the University of René Descartes in Paris.  Until his death in 1994, he would focus his work and research on preventing and treating Trisomy 21, the cause of Down’s syndrome.

        Prior to heading northwest to St. John’s, we stopped at the University of Minnesota where Dr, Lejeune was scheduled to give a lecture to medical students on the intricate elegance of DNA and RNA.  He was obviously in his element—a quiet confidence and wonderful sense of humor underlay his love and gift for sharing an enormously complex, microcosmic world.  At the close, the students showed their appreciation by clapping beyond the norm.

        Back on the road, he asked about my life and work at St. John’s University and seemed genuinely interested in my responses.  But, I wanted to talk about infinitely more interesting things, to wit, his life and research.  After graduate school (in theology), I had taken two years of pre-med and could ask basic scientific questions, so I did.  What ensued was a fascinating tour of the beginnings of human life: helical structures, DNA replication, the unbelievably sophisticated world of genetics.

        Over many years of chromosomal research, Dr. Lejeune said he had come to the awareness that our human building blocks/structures could not have come to be by chance.  For him, the pattern was too singular, too reasonable, too amazingly elegant to come from molecular randomness.  And he expressed the hope that someday he would be able to elucidate more the intricate mathematical and physiological “formulae” behind the design itself.

        For the next hour and a half, I soaked up as much as I could.  What impressed me more than Dr. Lejeune’s knowledge, was his person.  He was passionate without being the least pedantic.  He obviously loved life, at every level.  At no time was he ever patronizing.  Indeed, he was enthusiastic and completely at ease talking about mundane stuff.  He was completely engaged and therefore engaging.  Every now and then he would let his French sense of humor bubble to the surface.  At one point, with a wry smile and eyes twinkling, he quipped that his house in Paris was older than the United States.  He had gauged me correctly—I responded with a loud guffaw and a “put ’em up” look.

        Dr. Lejeune was a man of faith.  Indeed, he exuded faith… in life, in science, in God.  He saw no barriers, no compartments, no built-in contradictions amidst “levels” of reality, from the biological to the spiritual. 

        Suddenly, we were at St. John’s; an hour and a half drive in just about a minute and a half.  An unforgettable ride at warp speed.

Hat tip: The Catholic Laboratory