Prof. Jean François Marie Aicardi (1926–2015)

Prof. Jean François Marie Aicardi (1926–2015)

When Jean Aicardi died in August this year, the pediatric neurology community lost one of its most distinguished and prominent members. Jean Aicardi was, at the same time, most Parisian as he was international.

He was born in Paris in 1926 as the youngest of seven children. He went to school in Versailles and received his university education in Paris where he completed his MD in 1955. He then worked as a medical doctor and clinical researcher in Hôpital Des Enfants Malades, and then from 1964 to 1979, he worked in St. Vincent de Paul, one of the first departments of Child Neurology in Europe. Later, he went back again to Aux Enfants Malades until 1991. In 1969, he became chief investigator, and in 1986, the research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). INSERM corresponds to the medical Max-Planck institutes in Germany but with a closer relationship to the University hospitals. After his retirement, he still acted as Honorary Consultant at Hôpital Robert Debré in Paris.

Before he started to work as medical doctor in Paris, he had been Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School working with Ronnie Byers. While working in Paris, he was a visiting professor all around the world: in Cincinnati, Sydney, Sherbrooke, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Vancouver, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Brisbane, Miami, and Riyadh. He also was a highly respected plenary lecturer with regular invitations to major international meetings. After having retired in Paris, he was appointed honorary professor of Child Neurology at the Institute of Child Health, University of London and Honorary Consultant at Great Ormond Street.

He was a member of many national and international societies, editorial, or review boards and got many academic honours and distinctions. The Gesellschaft für Neuropädiatrie invited him to join the editorial board of “Neuropediatrics” in 1979, elected him honorary member in 1989, and awarded him its most prestigious research prize, the Peter-Emil-Becker-Price Award (the Honorary Award of the German-speaking Society of Child Neurology), in 2002.

Jean Aicardi was primarily known internationally as pediatric epileptologist, which is reflected by his huge publication list and by the fact that he edited a book “Epilepsy in Children” and was for a long time editor-in-chief of “Epileptic Disorders.” But this is far from sufficiently characterizing him. He was one of the rare child neurologists with expertise in the whole field and a truely encyclopedic knowledge. This explains why he could write the book “Diseases of the Nervous System in Childhood” almost all by himself—a book that has won highest appreciation by a large readership and is in the process of being published for the fourth time.

He had a deep and genuine interest for clinical work and very regularly and extensively saw patients who came not only from all over France but also from many parts of the world, especially the former French colonies. Looking at patients with a comprehensive knowledge in pediatric neurology and a highly scientific mind did not only make him a very good pediatric neurologist but also make him discover and characterize many diseases, some of them carrying his name. For example:

• Aicardi syndrome, described by him and his coworker Jean-Jacques Chevrie in 1986, is an x-linked disorder characterized by infantile spasms, corpus callosum agenesis, and a specific retinopathy with choroid lacunae.

• Aicardi–Goutières syndrome, described in 1984, is a progressive central nervous system disease, where authors already, at that time, stressed the familiarity “probably genetic in origin,” on the one hand, and the inflammatory nature, on the other.

• Alternating hemiplegia in infancy, described in 1980, is a syndrome characterized by alternating dystonic attacks followed by weakness starting in infancy and leading to usually severe develomental delay which could only recently be genetically defined.

The Society of Child Neurology in German-speaking Countries honours the memory of Jean Aicardi as an eminent researcher and outstanding child neurologist and teacher.