“We must do it and we will do it,” reacts Marc Joliot, one of Marie Curie’s great-grandsons in favor of demolition

The demolition of this historic building of the Institut Curie in Paris has been suspended by the Minister of Culture. “I am a fervent defender of the scientific project” to fight cancer, defends the great-grandson of Marie Curie, Saturday January 6 on franceinfo.

“We have to do it and we will do it”, reacts exclusively on Saturday January 6 on franceinfo, Marc Joliot, one of Marie Curie’s great-grandsons and director of research in multimodal biomedical images at the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA). Faced with the controversy and the mobilization of heritage defenders like Stéphane Bern, the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, announced on Friday the suspension of the demolition of the Pavillon des Sources, one of the historic buildings of the Marie Curie Institute .

The Institut Curie had obtained a demolition permit from the City of Paris, on March 24, 2023, to construct a larger building there, as part of a project to expand the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie-Val campus. -of-Grace. The future building is to house the first biological chemistry center for cancer in Europe. “I am a fervent defender of the scientific project”, adds Marc Joliot. He “would have liked to keep this building” but cancer research is “extraordinarily important”.

franceinfo: The work is currently suspended, are we not wasting time when cancer research could benefit from a new building?

Marc Joliot: It is clear that we are wasting time, but there is a controversy that goes beyond the scientific side and even beyond medicine. A political controversy, we will say, which means that we are forced to postpone the start of this construction a little. But I think that’s not the end of the story. The interesting thing that emerges from this meeting between Thierry Philip [président de l’Institut Curie] and Rima Abdul Malak, the Minister of Culture, is that they agreed to put in place a moratorium to be able to study a solution which will allow this new research building to be built in the best conditions.

Defenders of the building say that Marie Curie, Nobel Prize winner in physics, worked there, but within the Institute, it is more said that it was a radioactive waste storage building. What is your point of view ?

The Radium Institute is actually made up of three buildings. There is the radium building, the Pavillon des Sources and the Pavillon Pasteur. These are three historic buildings, knowing that Marie Curie’s laboratory was mainly in the first. She worked, like others, in the Pavilion of Sources, but only occasionally, when radioactive sources had to be made, and they were also stored.

This building is now abandoned and polluted. Doesn’t the preservation of heritage sometimes go against the scientific interests of the Institut Curie, or even of France?

It’s very complicated. I admit that I am a fervent defender of the scientific project. Currently, it is a very important scientific project of fundamental research on cancer. It’s a very beautiful project which was acclaimed by the scientific council of the Institut Curie, with people from all walks of life.

What can I say about this building? I would have liked it if we could keep it, but it’s 100 square meters, it’s polluted. It has been officially said that we cannot enter this building.

Marc Joliot, great-grandson of Marie Curie

on franceinfo

There’s no problem with what’s on the outside, but you can’t work on it on the inside. So on the one hand, we have research which seems extraordinarily important to me in the fight against cancer, on the other hand, we have a heritage which is certainly important, but which is not the entire heritage. We must consider that it is 5% of the heritage that we have and that the Institut Curie defends, finances at the same time as the museum, etc.

Stéphane Bern, for example, steps up to defend the Pavillon des Sources. This makes the matter a little more complicated though. No ?

These are postures, everyone is in their own domain. Stéphane Bern will defend what he knows. He doesn’t particularly know research, so he will be interested in heritage. Rachida Dati [maire du 7e arrondissement] consider that we are going to concrete Paris. The Curie Institute, which I represent today, finds itself at the center of a controversy that goes beyond it. This time, it’s me who speaks: I think it’s a shame to slow down because we’re going to do this project. We must do it and we will do it because it is extremely important. This is exactly what Curie is made for and continues to do, that is to say a link between research and medicine. There is a hospital, there is a research center and Curie is both. If we can’t do it, there aren’t many institutions in the world that can do it.