Jérome Lejeune was the French geneticist who discovered trisomy 21 in the late 1950s. At only 38, he held the chair of fundamental genetics at the University of Paris. He was named France's expert on atomic radiation to the United Nations, chosen by President Pompidou for the assembly of wise men, and became a member and then president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1974. He served as a messenger of Pope John Paul II to nations around the world. It is easy to picture him bent over a microscope, white coat buttoned, in the silence of a laboratory.
But Jérome Lejeune, who died in April 1994, was far more than this. He was a young man driven by a desire to help "the little ones." He was a husband, a father, a friend, a Christian. He was summer holidays with his wife and children in Denmark, three days at the wheel of a Renault 4CV, the smell of diapers so pungent it could stop the most scrupulous customs official. He was evening prayers with his children before bed. He was a grandfather explaining to his grandson the story of Tom Thumb—as he called the human embryo—using the same words he used with presidents and kings on his missions around the world against abortion. He was a home always open to unexpected guests. He was a doctor's gentleness as he walked parents through accepting a child with special needs. He was the rule that the telephone at home could ring even at night, because "when a parent is worried about their sick child's future, we have no right to make them wait." He was the letters he wrote to his wife and the loneliness of separation during the summers when he stayed in the laboratory while she and the children were at the seaside. He was an aperitif with friends after Sunday Mass. He was holding his father's hand as he died.
He was a meeting with Brezhnev in Russia, lunch with his friend John Paul II an hour before the 1981 assassination attempt. But he was also the target of those who fought his ideas. He was the patience of a man when someone threw raw liver at him during a lecture. He was the sorrow of losing research funding, the acceptance of friends who abandoned him, the endurance of being cast out by society for the discomfort of his words. And he bore the stigma of being an outcast—a reality that marked his children's childhood. At twelve years old, they cycled past black letters scrawled on walls, hurling insults at their father.
He was the surprise of finding himself lying flat on the ground in a small chapel in the Holy Land, moved by a profound gratitude to God expressed in this clumsy gesture that made him smile at himself.
All of this is told to us by his daughter, Clara Lejeune, in this text made available in Italy through the support of the Pro-Life Movement. Clara is a discreet and passionate witness to the life of a man—her father—who tried to live as he believed was right. And he was happy. Perhaps we might find something in his story for ourselves.
M.C.V., 2008