Jules A. Hoffmann was born in Echternach, Luxembourg in 1941. He studied at the University of Strasbourg in France, where he obtained his PhD in 1969. After postdoctoral training at the University of Marburg, Germany, he returned to Strasbourg, where he headed a research laboratory from 1974 to 2009. He has also served as director of the Institute for Molecular Cell Biology in Strasbourg and during 2007-2008 as President of the French National Academy of Sciences. He is a research director and member of the board of administrators of the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg, France.
In 2011, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists; with one half jointly to Prof. Hoffmann and Bruce A. Beutler for discovering the function of the fruit fly Toll gene in innate immunity and function of Toll-like receptors in mammals. The other half of the prize went to Ralph M. Steinman for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. The work of Hoffmann and Beutler concerning the activation of innate immunity has revolutionized our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation. Their discoveries have provided novel insights into disease mechanisms, opened up new avenues for the development of prevention and therapy against infections, cancer, and inflammatory diseases. They triggered an explosion of research in innate immunity - also called the non-specific immune system, it is the first step in the body's immune response which can destroy invading microorganisms.
Dear Professor, what is your relationship with the University of CAS? Do you often come to China?
This time, I came here upon the invitation of the French Embassy for the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and on that occasion, I was awarded an honorary professorship at UCAS. However, my first visit to China was in 1980, and at that time I came because of research on insect hormones. There was a good school in Shanghai which doesn’t exist anymore at the Institute of Entomology that was a part of CAS. We started working on insect hormones, so scientists from China were coming to our lab in Strasbourg for several years, and we had a very good relationship.
I had created a company, looking at the potential interest of microbial peptides in therapy. We had forty people in the company, and they were looking at many kinds of insects. For these purposes they were trying to find an area with high biodiversity. The Chinese suggested Yunnan province, so I spent there several weeks which was very interesting. As for my current engagements in China, we are building a Sino-French Hoffmann Institute at the Guangzhou Medical University. I also got contacted by a lady who is building up a research institute in Beijing. I will be back in October for the opening. She also wants to establish a similar institute in Paris, where I would have an advisory position.
How has your research work changed since the Nobel Prize? What’s next?
Somehow, I would like to manage a little bit more time for myself and my wife. Unfortunately, right now I get to spend only about twenty percent of my time in Strasbourg, so in one or two years, I would like to relax more. Ever since I got the Nobel Prize, I have given about 150 lectures all over the world. I've just come from Canada, from China I am going straight to Israel. That's why I feel quite exhausted.
As for my next plans, I will start again as a professor in immune biology in Strasbourg. Strasbourg University is one of the best universities in France. We are the only French university with three Nobel laureates! Two Nobel winners in chemistry, one in biology, and another one in biology is hopefully on the way.
Apart from that, I am not a director of a laboratory anymore. But I have two new post-docs, and I want to develop work on the interface between cancer and tumours in flies and their immune system. That has not been looked at yet and it might be something interesting and new.
As a young researcher, why were you attracted to your field? What advice do you have for young aspiring scientists?
Like everyone else, I had been influenced by a certain number of people. I have always been interested in insects, which came from my father, who was an entomologist. He got me interested in this enormous, fascinating world. Then, when I came to Strasbourg – I am from Luxembourg, but Luxembourg had no university at that time – there was an interesting professor who worked on grasshoppers. He proposed to me to do a PhD with him. At the time neither my parents nor I had thought I would do a PhD. My professor was working in the hormone world – endocrinology. He told me that this is a field which is coming to its end, in the way we study it, as all important research has been done. That was the time when biochemistry was still not around. He told me: "What has been striking to me is that although I never took any care of aseptic techniques or antibiotics during my experiments with grasshoppers, never did there occur any infection. This means insects must have very powerful defence reactions!Why don’t you take this as your research topic?" That was all. He let me go, and I had to develop the idea.
It is important to say that we really asked this question in the context of scientific curiosity. We have a very important animal group, they are resistant to microbes, and no one knows why! No one at that time would ask us, well, what do you apply it for? What is this going to yield? Do you have contacts with companies? Will this be able to create jobs? Well, science is curiosity, and whatever you find, will add something to our general knowledge.
Has the Nobel had any impact on your research and your motivation to conduct research?
No, as you should never work for prizes. It would be a wrong attitude for a researcher to do research in order to win a Nobel Prize. I have been asked about that many times, "I want to get the Nobel, what should I do?", but if you think like that, something is wrong in your psyche. You go into science because you have an intellectual stimulus. You want to understand, you want to know more. I could have worked on plants; I could have become a medical doctor. In the end, without my father I would not have done science at all. I wanted to do more literature, history, philosophy, languages. Insects, that happened mainly because of my father. He is probably somewhere up there watching. It would be fun to discuss this with him again.
What do you see as the biggest implications of your research?
The implications of the work of the community working on fruit flies have been enormous. Our paper from 1996 in Cell on toll-like receptors was the first ever that illustrated that toll could be involved in immune response. Now, about 25,000 papers have appeared on the topic. Toll receptors are involved in our kidneys, eyes, skin, brains; they are involved in everything, you name it. There is not a single human tissue that does not produce toll receptors. So it is extremely important. I have contributed to that, and the Nobel community thought I had a major role.
Is it surprising to see how your research developed since the initial stage, from fundamental research to the applied field?
First of all, it needs to be said that the research has been the work of many individuals and laboratories, and the result of very good connections with very intelligent people that I have built up over the years. So I have rather been "a small saint in a big church".
None of us at that time anticipated that we would find the basis of innate immunity. The way it turned out was a big surprise to us - we had thought that insects have somehow developed a different type of defence systems. And what we saw, step by step, year by year, was that in fact it is a very common ancestral mechanism, with a certain number of evolutions on the way.
Imagine that two hundred years ago, people wanted to improve candle light. And then, someone else came up with something completely different and unanticipated, which changed the world. I would have never thought I would contribute to a new field, and the directions where it's developed into are surprising. Recently, I went to an international meeting on cardiology! I would have never imagined this.
How important do you think it is for a scientist today to communicate with the research community, but also the media and general public, to attract funding and attention to a particular research field? Is it more important than in the past?
Certainly, media has become far, far more important than in the past. Also, we need to remind others to leave space for simple, curiosity-driven research. I have personally never had problems with funding, but there is a certain danger of things being erased, because money is tight. There is overall more money than in my times, but the competition for the money is enormous. Writing grant applications is a big burden. And paper is patient. You can write anything on a paper.
That is why we have research agencies, such as CNRS, CAS, which say, how about we give you some money, and you can develop your idea. Maybe it will never yield anything, and we will lose our money. Maybe only one out of five projects will actually generate something. There are so many examples. Look at
Pasteur or Koch, and the way they found bacteria - in the beginning, they weren't really looking for that on purpose.
Clearly, any society needs applied research as well as clinical research. But if you only stick to this, you will miss out. We have to leave some space for basic research too. Take for example cancer research: In 1970, U.S President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. They put enormous amount of money into this, but it didn’t produce much result. Why? Because cancer is basic biology in which something goes wrong. But if you don’t know basic biology, then you won’t know where it went wrong. Before understanding what went wrong, you have to understand what is going on.
Do you think awards, including the most prestigious of all - the Nobel Prize - play a positive role in the advancement of scientific knowledge or do you see negative impacts as well? The question of the overall impact of highly publicized scientific prizes on the way research work is conducted, might be particularly relevant in China, where there is a strong political wish to win a Nobel prize in hard sciences.
I sometimes have the feeling that the importance of prizes is being overplayed. When we got the Nobel Prize, me with Bruce Beutler, as well as the other Nobel laureates - all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - went to its annual meeting. We were being questioned in front of 600 American academicians for three hours, at a round table chaired by Mr Steven Chu, the secretary of energy in the Obama administration and a Nobel laureate of physics. My feeling was that among those 600 members of the National Academy of Sciences, probably forty or fifty would be well eligible for the Nobel. And it sometimes bothers me that there are so many people who will never get the prize, and then there is such a fuss around those who do. So I always try to play my own Nobel Prize down.
By the way, the Chinese maybe don't have the Nobel Prize in hard sciences but they have got the Shaw Prize! And many people who got Shaw Prize are also awarded the Nobel. Bruce Beutler and I share the Shaw Prize as well; it is a very significant prize which by the way also gives more money than Nobel.
I am happy I got the prize, but it I hasn’t changed anything in me, nor my wife, nor my children. It is the way people look at you that is totally different. Why would you invite Bruce Beutler or Jules Hoffmann to UCAS now if not for their Nobel? If you got the prize, it means you have achieved something. But the others can be just as good as you, although they are not laureates. Most of the good people know it and they react that way.
Professor Hoffmann, thank you very much for your time!