Family

His father, Emanuel Ameisen, with Polish and Jewish origins, emigrated to Paris in the 1930s, where he became an engineer after completing studies in Grenoble.^[3] His mother Janine Ameisen was a painter and survivor of Auschwitz. She then lived in the United States where Jean Claude Ameisen was born.

He is the older brother of Olivier Ameisen, a doctor who successfully experimented with baclofen against alcohol dependence,^[4][5] and Éva Ameisen, stomatologist and songwriter.

Career

He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Alsacienne, then studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Cochin and Lille University Hospital where he did his internship. He specializes in pneumology and focuses on immunology research within INSERM. He was a postdoctoral fellow then associate researcher in immunology at Yale University School of Medicine (1986–1987). He was a lecturer and hospital practitioner in immunology at Lille University Hospital (1989–1996). In 1994, he was appointed director of the Inserm U415 unit at the Institut Pasteur in Lille. In 1996, he was appointed Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute of Allergy and Immunology at La Jolla (LIAI) in California and, in 1998, Professor of Immunology at Bichat Hospital (Paris-Diderot University).^[4] In September 2011, he was appointed director of the Centre for Life Studies at the Paris Institute of Humanities.^[6]

Functions on ethics committees

Jean Claude Ameisen was president of the INSERM ethics committee from 2003 to 2012,^[7] and in 2005 became a member of the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE).^[8] On 3 October 2012, on the proposal of the President of the Republic François Hollande, the Social Affairs Committee of the National Assembly and that of the Senate approved his appointment to the presidency of the CCNE to replace Alain Grimfeld having completed his term.^[9][10] He took office on 9 November 2012,^[11] he became honorary president at the time of the appointment of Jean-François Delfraissy on 14 December 2016.^[12]

Other activities

Author of many essays on science, he is, since September 2010, the creator and the host of the show Sur les épaules de Darwin on France Inter radio.^[13][5]

In July 2011, he joined Martine Aubry's campaign team for the 2012 presidential election, in charge, with Charlotte Brun, of the subject "Elderly people, Dependency, and Disability".^[14]