KEYNOTE SPEAKER - The EMBO Lecture
Université R. Descartes Medical School Paris, France; Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences, Split, Croatia
We have a great pleasure to host, as a keynote speaker, Professor Miroslav Radman (Institut Necker, Paris, France / MedILS, Split, Croatia), the FEMS-Lwoff awardee 2011.
A passionate biologist wishes to transcend the limitations of human biology
I am impatiently longing for a much better life of thehumankind. Only by learning how life functions and why it ceases to function, by exploringthe limits of life and death, can we break out of the slavery to our genes and become something truly special in the living world. Emancipating cultural evolution from the slow, wasteful and cruel natural biological evolution -that is the researchproject that excites me now – after well over four decades of research on mechanisms of DNA repair and replication, mutation, genetic recombination, molecular evolution and cancer.
I am aware of the importance of the banality that, like everybody else, I could not choose the egg and the sperm that made up my biology, nor could I choose my parents, and their cultural geography, that have largely determined my personality. Hence, no guilt and no merit for what I became! I just tried to do the best I could within the limits of my
biological and cultural imprints from which I tried to emancipate as much as I could, and wanted, as I grew older.
So, I happen to be born in a cellar in the bombarded city of Split (Croatia) towards the end of Second World War and to grow up happily on beautiful Adriatic islands of Solta and Hvar. I was lucky to have had smart, strong and loving parents with only four years of elementary school. I love my talented and humorous family: my wife Danica and my children Mikula,Ljuba and Maria, and enjoy the friendship and generosityof many friends all over the world. If interested, the reader can get to know me better by reading the first chapter of my book “Beyond our biological limitations”.
