Efforts will be rewarded beyond his expectations

His new challenge to the Presidency of the Academy of sciences, Professor Alain Carpentier deals it, at seventy-seven years, with an inexhaustible energy and a question that taps: "in the current context which is of a certain seriousness, how it can help the France." "The quality of its members and its total independence from public authorities, the Academy of sciences has a freedom of speech that I feel as a duty of action in the service of our country," he says. The founder of the laboratory of research biochirurgicale of European hospital Georges-Pompidou said honored to endorse this prestige function, which only six surgeons have accessed for three centuries.

Serve his country is the fixed idea that drops him in the head from childhood. At the age of six, he lived a traumatic experience which made his incredible destiny. Taken of terrible abdominal pain a day 1939, full curfew at Senlis, he will be operated in extremis of peritonitis by mobilized surgeon, under incredible circumstances. The coolness of his mother, distinguished pianist in the Red Cross, the mark to life. But the little boy will overcome many other obstacles to reach his dream to be surgeon finger. Because if it extraordinary memories of the Algeria, where his family fled in the early 1940s, education has suffered. "I have lived the American landing, bullets hissed over the House. "My high school was occupied and, with my brothers, we were more frequent than tennis in our studies," he recalled.

Pushing the limits of the impossible

Back in France, in the Vosges mountains where her father, Polytechnique, became engineer of the Ponts et Chaussées, "I realized that I was no so tell me that I could not be a doctor." "My father wanted to put myself in a cabinetmaking school," says Alain Carpentier, whose chaotic journey as an example the current youth: "when you have a passion, he must fight against winds and tides and, above all, do not despair." Recognizing his abilities in second, he will work hard. Efforts will be rewarded beyond his expectations. Never this passionate piano and abstract painting have imagined that it would be one day a surgeon claimed and award-winning everywhere in the world. Professor at the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York, he taught in the universities the most valued and trained his young disciples hand. Without detracting from its sacrosanct rule: "I do accept a student only if he returns to his country, which requires me to help him", says Alain Carpentier. It is in this context he has created services of cardiac surgery in Algeria, the Morocco, the Lebanon, and even an Institute at the Viet Nam. Never had it hoped that his inventions building world cardiology. Like the biological valves Carpentier-Edwards which does not require the taking of blood thinners, have improved the lives of millions of patients and the Lasker Award in 2007. "Americans is there are not mistaken, this is my greatest contribution to medicine. But the invention which embodies the soul of Alain Carpentier is the totally implantable artificial heart, that he refines with Carmat society. An extraordinary project that he was able to achieve in France with the unwavering support of his friend, Jean-Luc Lagardère. If the first intervention on human, his perseverance has pushed the boundaries of the impossible.