Jean Rostand

Jean Rostand (Paris, 30 October 1894 – Ville-d'Avray, 4 September 1977) was a French biologist, writer, philosopher and historian of science, elected to the Académie française in 1959. He matters because he combined laboratory research with popular writing and with a sustained moral reflection on what science should and should not be used for, at a time when eugenics, nuclear weapons and abortion law were fiercely debated in France.

He was the son of the playwright Edmond Rostand and the poet Rosemonde Gérard. As a child he spent time in Cambo-les-Bains, in the French Basque Country. He often said that reading Jean-Henri Fabre's insect studies at the age of ten shaped his vocation. After graduating in science, he settled in Ville-d'Avray in 1922 and ran a private laboratory at home, deliberately outside the university system, which he felt constrained independent work.

His research concentrated on amphibians, parthenogenesis, embryonic development and heredity. He began with philosophical essays and then divided his time between experiments and a large body of popular science. His prose is short, aphoristic and openly moral. His views on eugenics were later criticised: he backed what he called positive eugenics and accepted sterilisation in severe cases, positions that after the Second World War seemed close to Nazi policy. Over time he became a committed pacifist and campaigned against nuclear armament. He called himself an agnostic and a freethinker, and in 1971 he joined Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir in founding the Choisir movement, which campaigned for the decriminalisation of abortion.

His legacy lies in popular science, for which he received the Kalinga Prize in 1959, and in his insistence on the ethics of biology. He is remembered as a writer who urged science to be modest about its limits and alert to its social dangers.