Georges Charpak will work there until his retirement in 1989

Rare are the scientists whose death announcement immediately awakens in the man in the street, a memory, an image. Georges Charpak, disappeared Wednesday at the age of eighty-six, was of them. That there is or is not a science, all everyone reviews immediately the mane of white hair, the clear and light blue eyes, high stature and the smile corner that was, his life, a "particle Tracker" outstanding, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992. Those who have read his books or became interested in more closely to its action of informed and committed man, recall his elegance, his generosity, his refusal to take seriously. "I still do not understand why I'm with Einstein or the Curia on the list of the Nobel", he said a few years after his return to Stockholm, adding humorously that he had received the prestigious award "a machin of 10 x 10".

The "machin" in question, this is the room multi-threaded, this particle detector performance that he had designed and developed in 1968, while he was researcher at CERN in Geneva. As his colleague and friend Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, recipient of the Nobel in Physics a year before him, Georges Charpak was not a theorist confined in the upper reaches of pure abstraction.

"Handyman" of engineering, the inexhaustible creativity - it could submit up to four or five patents per year-, he never had to applied research or industrial applications a little contemptuous disdain that sometimes show some men of science. Pushed on the contrary, his temperament of "smuggler" him, twice, to create a company to commercialize his invention.

Interested in biology, he had the idea to adapt its particle detectors to make medical imaging devices can operate much faster than existing ones, so reducing the exposure time of the patient to the radioactive products. It is thus Biospace Instruments was born in 1989, followed in 1995 Biospace measures, with this time the support of the Cogema, which Jean Syrota had meanwhile offered a seat to administrator. The humanist dreamed to see its expensive machines spread in hospitals and, thus, to improve care. But economic reality was quickly felt and the second company, intended to produce in series, has had difficult beginnings. No doubt, Georges Charpak, among all his skills, lacked those of businessman. "It could be catastrophic in this role," said Claude Hennion, companion of the first time in this industrial adventure recently.

Deported to Dachau

Vitriolic as soon as it was readily blagueur, nuclear physics when he spoke of his own work, the man was much less talkative as soon as it was before him the black years of Dachau, preferably referring his interlocutor to the reading of Primo Levi. Son of Polish Jews, born in the village of Dabrowica (today located in the Ukraine), it is still only a boy when his family emigrated to Paris, in the early 1930s. During the war, the ex-brillant pupil of lycée Saint-Louis becomes resistant. On his return to Dachau, he overcomes his concentration camp past however, at the Ecole des mines de Paris and studies at the Sorbonne, where he took courses of Physics of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie prior to joining the laboratory of the latter to the College of France. It is also during her time of political activism, FCP, that he will leave in 1957. The following year, the American Leon Lederman will invite him to join his team at CERN. Georges Charpak will work there until his retirement in 1989.

He is Honorary Professor at the school of physics and chemistry of Paris (ESPCI) - which also operates Pierre-Gilles de Gennes - when the Nobel the "uncovers her comfortable situation" and requires it to "take care of the world," duty of it including creating handmade dough. Directly inspired by the action undertaken by Leon Lederman in the ghettoes of Chicago, this association aims to facilitate the learning of science by any young children by bringing them to realize themselves of small experiments. This no doubt was there for its creator a way to convey a parcel of this Promethean fire never ceased to burn him.