Cyrille Jeancolas, doctoral student in molecular biology and social anthropology

Why did you choose the field of the origins of life ?

I've always been interested in everything to do with living things. After my final year at S, I went on to study biology at a science preparatory class, and then went on to study cellular and molecular biology at AgroParisTech engineering school.

I discovered a growing fascination for the molecular mechanisms that underpin the functioning of living beings, be they bacteria, animals or plants. One question lingered in the back of my mind : how could such complex biological systems have arisen ?

To better understand this, I started reading articles on the subject, and had the opportunity to do an internship in chemistry at the École normale supérieure, during which I tried to set up a metabolism, i.e. all the chemical reactions that enable a living being to breathe, move, reproduce, etc., but at an extremely primitive stage. I really enjoyed this experience, but I realized that the questions we ask ourselves on a day-to-day basis are far removed from the fundamental ones for which we were drawn into this research. I was quite disillusioned. I didn't enjoy producing scientific results so much as getting to know them, putting them into dialogue with each other and drawing conclusions about life and its origins.

From there, I also developed a passion for the philosophy of science and the humanities more generally, thanks in particular to a "césure" (a gap year) open to all students, which enabled me to take a semester of training in the humanities.

How did you manage to combine biology and anthropology ?

My fifth-year internship took place at ESPCI, again on the theme of the origins of life : I was making proto-cells, rudimentary cells of sorts, from carbohydrates and drops of water in oil. Following this, I decided to pursue my thesis in the same laboratory, in connection with a research program at the Université PSL, called Origines et conditions d'apparition de la vie (OCAV). It brings together several PSL members, including the Collège de France.

The OCAV program has an Astrophysics cluster, a Biochemistry cluster and a Humanities and Social Sciences cluster, including anthropology. Knowing my tastes, Philippe Nghe, a biophysicist at the ESPCI and my internship supervisor at the time, suggested I write a thesis project for OCAV, in collaboration with Perig Pitrou, an anthropologist at the Collège de France. Perig Pitrou was very open to this initiative : the team he heads is interested in the concepts of life held by humans in all their diversity.

How do scientists define life ?

In reality, no definition of life is unanimously accepted in science, even if there are certain properties that are regularly found. A given researcher may have a different sensibility from another, about what he considers to be a vital property or not. From this stems one of the issues of my thesis : how do our conceptions of life as researchers influence our work on the origins of life ?

What is social anthropology ?

Etymologically, anthropology means " study of human beings ". Historically, two branches have been formed : biological anthropology, which studies humans and their evolution from a physical point of view, via excavations to find ancient bones for example, and social anthropology, which studies humans from a social and cultural point of view.

The boundaries between anthropology and sociology are porous. While sociological work can be rather quantitative, the specificity of anthropology lies in its research method : fieldwork, or ethnography. This involves fully describing a cultural group from the inside, and may include participant observation, i.e. the anthropologist is both actor and observer of the group's activities. Bronisław Malinowski is often credited with conducting the first participant observation transcribed in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922.

Until the 1970s, Western anthropologists specialized in ethnographies of so-called " exotic " populations, while they knew very little about certain cultural groups within the West itself. Among these groups was the world of scientific research, and in particular the laboratory. One of the first anthropologists to immerse himself in this field was Bruno Latour. For example, he analyzed how researchers move from the beginnings of discovery to the production of a " scientific fact ". I'm following in his footsteps.

A UV lamp is used to momentarily visualize the presence of RNA of precise lengths in a gel in the form of dark spots. A pen is used to draw the outline of the spots on the gel, which are then cut with a scalpel to extract the different RNA populations.

Your profile is rather atypical, as you combine two distant sciences..

My research consists in producing experimental proto-living systems, i.e. systems at the interface between the non-living and the living, and to set this against the description of how these systems are made by my research team and myself. To do this, I use biochemistry and anthropology.

Biochemistry is the study of chemical reactions between molecules from living organisms. Among these are nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, very large molecules that carry our genetic code, and whose study characterizes molecular biology.

For my thesis, I'm interested in certain types of RNA, known as catalytic RNAs. They have the capacity to accelerate chemical reactions, while remaining carriers of genetic information. Thanks to these characteristics, they could be among the first molecules at the origin of life. In my experiments, I make these RNAs react with each other in water and observe what happens, how they cut, elongate and join. The aim is to set up Darwinian evolutionary dynamics, the principles of which are : reproduction with heredity (RNAs make copies of themselves), variation (RNA sequences change) and selection (certain RNAs perpetuate themselves thanks to their sequences).

This first aspect of molecular biology is linked to the second, which is anthropological. In anthropology, the scientific results presented, particularly in the form of articles, fall under what is known as the " context of justification " : researchers tell the story they feel like telling according to a defined scripted framework. This masks the "context of discovery", the way in which results are actually obtained. A scientist at a conference, for example, will tend to say : " and then, one day, I had this idea to answer this precise question, etc. " when the process was actually much more complex.

As a PhD student in biochemistry and anthropology, my mission is twofold : I use my own experimental subject to depict these two forms of context and compose an ethnography.

What does your daily life consist of ?

Anthropology begins with an exploration of one's own terrain : you write down everything you do and everything you see. I found this rather disconcerting at first, because in the culture of a biochemist, writing is the restitution of a result already obtained. But for an anthropologist, writing is in a way the constitution of the result itself, and it's only afterwards that he'll be able to break it down. In the beginning, writing down my observations gave me the impression that I was wasting precious time, distracting myself from my experiments on the bench. I had to learn to think like a biochemist and an anthropologist at the same time.

At the same time, I write articles for peers and the general public on these issues. I've also taken part in the " Ateliers des doctorants du LAS ", during which we present our field investigations in a very informal and human way : I'd never seen anything like it anywhere else. At the Collège de France, I was also able to attend the lunch seminars , seminars that cover a wide range of topics, and not just physics, chemistry or biology. Interdisciplinarity knows no boundaries.

At the moment I'm lucky enough to be doing what I'm passionate about, and in the future I'd ideally like to be a teacher-researcher. Participating in research and education for a social understanding of scientific and technical phenomena would appeal to me enormously.

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Cyrille Jeancolas works under the supervision of Philippe Nghe, director of the LBE at ESPCI, and Perig Pitrou, director of the Anthropologie de la vie team within the LAS at Collège de France. His thesis is entitled " Fabricating life in a biochemistry laboratory ? Experiments on the evolutionary properties of biomolecular networks, ethnographic investigation and epistemological reflection ".

Photos © Patrick Imbert
Interview by Océane Alouda