Glasgow University honours Professor Christian Bréchot

Professor Christian Bréchot, Director General of the French national medical research agency INSERM, has been honoured by the University of Glasgow.

On 21 June, during the Commemoration Day ceremony at which Professor Sir Kenneth Calman was installed as the university’s new Chancellor, Professor Christian Bréchot received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa).

Sir Kenneth Calman made the presentation at the university’s traditional ceremony, attended by the French Consul General in Edinburgh, M. Pierre-Antoine Berniard, INSERM’s UK representative, Dr Jacques Chevalier, and all the members of the INSERM Unit 609 malaria research team led by Professor Christian Doerig at the Glasgow Wellcome Centre for Parasitology.

Professor Peter Holmes, Pro Vice-Principal, an active supporter of the development of joint PhD programmes between France and Scotland, and the establishment in Glasgow of the first INSERM-funded laboratory at a university outside France, stressed the benefits of this close cooperation with the French medical research agency.

The success of this excellent partnership has just led INSERM to set up an "Associated European Laboratory, a laboratory "without walls" combining teams from Dundee and Toulouse universities, working on cancer research in collaboration with Cancer Research UK.