Little lady, big responsibilities. Recently renewed to the branch of the Pasteur Institute, Alice Dautry is his frail shoulders the weight of 2,600 employees, 240 million euros in budget, 130 research units and 32 offices abroad. Scans hard epidemiological horizon from the top of his fifty-five metre, by standing ready to respond to more quickly if a new pandemic is declared. "We are beginning to be well organized," relativizes this discrete scientist of fifty years, stubbornly absent the "Who's Who". It is true that global alerts were not missed since his arrival at the controls of the Institute in October 2005. It was just sitting in his new wheelchair that infamous mosquito spread virus chikungunya on the island of Réunion. The next two years, it was the turn of chickens and other poultry affected by avian influenza to the headlines of the gazettes. And here is that the World Health Organization has just raise the rank of pandemic influenza A (H1N1). "The 21st century be the return of infectious diseases," it predicted in a big smile. It is been necessary little Alice Dautry became UN interpreter or translator of Russian novels rather than the world specialist on the transport of iron in the body. Secondary school student, the eldest of three children who has inherited his mother violinist a taste for music - one of his finest radio memories remains to have been the guest of Olivier Bellamy on Radio Classique - had extensively vacillated between serious studies of engineer and his love of foreign languages. It will opt eventually for math sup - before splitting to the research.
Swollen block by the "american spirit".

His way, Alice Dautry is a child of May 1968. Student in Mole to St. Louis where the fire was taking in the nearby Sorbonne, it is lack of tranquility in this respect. And the FCC, where it eventually get a DEA of solid-state physics before studying the properties of superconductors at low temperature to Orsay laboratory, in the shadow of Jacques Friedel and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. The use of the tools of Physics in biology at the biology itself, there was nothing that the young woman burning cross. It do so across the Atlantic, at the University of New York State. Back to France where it eventually his physics thesis before returning to the study of cells, it will remain inflated block by the "american spirit" - the belief that anything is possible. It is in the MIT, where she was visiting scientist invited from 1981 to 1983, that it will highlight the iron transport mechanisms. Support since 1992 of a research unit specialized in the study of cellular interactions, this mother of two great married a biologist of CNRS has always been careful to convey this enthusiasm in the younger generations. Since its inception at the Pasteur Institute in 1977, until his accession to the General Directorate, twenty-eight years later, she never continued to teach at the Institut Pasteur, of course, but also to the X. One of the facets of his work that she enjoys the most - the other being the international nature of life at Pasteur, real Tower of Babel where more than 60 nationalities coexist. What use full multilingual capabilities.