Biologist and France alumni Edith Heard wins the CNRS 2024 gold medal

The CNRS gold medal was created in 1954 to become one of the most prestigious French scientific awards. It is awarded to “scientists who have made an outstanding contribution to the dynamism and influence of French research”. The CNRS gold medal comes with a 50,000 euros endowment, and will be awarded to Heard on 12 December in an official ceremony in Paris.

Pioneer work on chromosomes

“Spearheading the field of epigenetics, Edith Heard is internationally renowned for her pioneering work on the inactivation of the X chromosome.” As the CNRS writes, the award goes this year to a world-renowned specialist. A booming discipline since 2000, epigenetics “examines what shapes us beyond our DNA”. According to the CNRS, her discoveries are “crucial for understanding how genes work in mammals, opening up promising medical prospects for treating numerous diseases”. More specifically, Heard worked on the fundamental mechanisms “responsible for the X inactivation process in mammals, and humans in particular”.

Now a professor at the Collège de France, where she holds the “Epigenetics and cellular memory” chair, Heard is also head of the prestigious European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). 

Excellent integration in France

Born in London in 1965, Edith Heard studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, before taking an interest in epigenetics during her thesis on “genic amplification in cancer” at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London.  According to her biography, she arrived in France in 1990 on a scholarship from the Human Frontier Science Program and. She then joined the Institut Pasteur as a post-doctorate, where she began work on the inactivation of the X chromosome, which was to become the “guiding principle of her career”. 

In an interview in 2017 to CFDT, Edith Heard declared: “When I arrived in France to work in fundamental research, I barely spoke French, and I learnt in my host lab (...). I was pleasantly surprised by how foreign researchers were welcomed. The fact that I was a foreigner wasn’t even a subject. I was deeply influenced by that. France really opened its doors to researchers from all over the world.” And she concluded: “It really is a chance to be a woman researcher in France! ”.

International action

Under contract at the CNRS, she became later, in 2010, director of “Génétique et biologie du développement”, a joint research laboratory between the CNRS, Inserm and the Institut Curie.  Since then, Heard has headed the prestigious European lab, an intergovernmental research body involving 29 countries. In addition, Heard was elected as a member of the Académie des sciences, and sits on several scientific councils, including the WHO Scientific Council. In 2020, she was awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science International Prize. The CNRS also says that in the summer of 2025, she will once again work both in the UK and France to become Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Heard is also “a fervent advocate of science and international collaboration”. According to the CNRS, the internationally-recognised researchers committed to the PAUSE programme, which aims to temporarily host scientists from geopolitical crisis zones. The PAUSE programme helps their integration in higher education and research institutions in multidisciplinary programmes.