Jérôme Santolini
Conference “For a More Open, Critical and Living Research”. In dialogue: Stengers, Santolini and Considère, University of Lille.
Conference “For a More Open, Critical and Living Research”. In dialogue: Stengers, Santolini and Considère, University of Lille. Conference “For a More Open, Critical and Living Research”. In dialogue: Stengers, Santolini and Considère, University of Lille.LILLIAD Learning Center Innovation, Lille.
Building the path by walking it, cultivating questions instead of imposing answers. Jérôme Santolini is a biochemist who studies oxidative stress at CEA-Saclay. But when he talks about his work, he doesn’t talk about molecules. He talks about crises. About a system of crises – ecological, climatic, health, social, political – which are manifestations of a deeper problem: the relationship our civilisation has built with the world.
For Jérôme, crises are not catastrophes to be avoided. They are fractures that make visible what remains hidden. They are spaces where power relations become evident, where contradictions emerge, and where imagining something different becomes possible. Crises are opportunities for transformation.
This is not a comfortable position. Jérôme knows that modern sciences have participated in constructing the grand narrative of Modernity – progress, reason, development. He knows that this narrative has always been arrogant, brutal, blind. And he knows that scientists have failed in narrating crises because truly narrating them means questioning that narrative and one’s own role.
But Jérôme has chosen to inhabit this failure, to make it the space of his action.
When he discovered that in school canteens children eat from plastic containers that release endocrine disruptors, he did not simply publish. He became involved in Cantine Sans Plastique, a collective initiative in which parents confronted with the health scandal of food plastics came together not to find a final agreement but to share concerns, knowledge, and questions. Jérôme participates as an expert biochemist, but discovers it’s a collective learning process where he also learns: from parents’ concerns, from cooks’ practical knowledge, from administrators’ resistance. It was not science communication; it was a reciprocal transformation. In 2018, this mobilisation achieved a law banning plastics in canteens.
Another health scandal concerns nitrite additives in processed meats: despite acknowledgement of the link between nitrite additives and colorectal cancer, which causes thousands of deaths each year in Europe, the Ministry of Agriculture decided to maintain the status quo.
Jérôme understands the failure of regulatory agencies to mobilise knowledge to guide public decisions. Resisting the conformism and culpable passivity of public actors, he attempted to transform this technical issue into a political and scientific challenge.
For Jérôme, responsibility is the capacity to respond to the appeals of those involved. It’s presence-commitment in the world. It’s accepting that no one can be right alone and that all knowledge must be tested not only by peers but by all those involved.
This vision leads him to join Scientifiques en Rébellion and become an administrator of Sciences Citoyennes. Not because he rejects science, but because he wants a different science. A science that doesn’t shut itself in the ivory tower, that doesn’t submit to the assessments of politico-economic power, and that accepts being transformed by the encounter with other forms of knowledge.
He defines himself as a gleaner-weaver. He gathers knowledge, questions, stories, in laboratories but also in the concrete and imaginary dimensions of our lives, trying to bring out other ways of inhabiting our living environments. He embraces the Zapatista walking-questioning: building the path by walking it, cultivating questions instead of imposing answers. He speaks of regeneration, of ending the Anthropocene: radically changing the relationship between humanity and nature, and between science and society.
When the far right achieves a record result in the elections and Macron dissolves the Assembly, Jérôme’s reaction is physical: anguish. But the anguish transforms. He has read: “Worse than the sound of boots, the silence of slippers”. He’s understood that this is another crisis, another space for action.
He states: we are the society defending itself. Not only researchers, but citizens who use science to defend the future. And defending doesn’t mean preserving but transforming.
Jérôme knows that a law on plastics won’t resolve the systemic crisis. He knows that denouncing nitrites, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and other pollutants will not stop the litany of health scandals. But he also knows that each well-constructed problematic situation, each space of collective learning, and each transformation of relationships is a building block for constructing something new.
His science is one of crises and in crises. A science that doesn’t seek to solve problems but to transform relationships. That doesn’t divide between who’s right and who’s wrong but creates spaces where different voices can be heard. That doesn’t educate the public but participates in collective learning. That inhabits contradictions and uses them as spaces for action.
For Jérôme, crises are not the end. They are fractures through which something new can emerge. They are spaces where consolidated relationships are questioned, where it becomes possible to imagine other ways of doing science and other ways of being in the world. Paradoxically, they are necessary. This is not because pain is good, but because power relations become visible and therefore transformable only in crises.
Jérôme studies detoxification at the molecular level. But the real intoxication is systemic. It’s in the way modernity has transformed the world into a resource, the land into yield, and knowledge into performance. And detoxification must be equally systemic: it passes through the transformation of our relationship with the world.
Jérôme Santolini is a biochemist who has understood that his work is not studying molecules but inhabiting the fractures of the world. And in these fractures, with tenacity, he builds spaces for transformation.
Jérôme Santolini’s key dates
1971 · Birth.
1999 · Doctorate in science.
A professional choice: from Chemistry to Biology.
From mastery to an understanding of Living Matter.
The birth of a vocation: researcher.
2004 · Death of Emile, my first son, in tragic circumstances.
Total collapse.
The search for meaning as an urgency.
2006 · Birth of Gaspard and Adèle.
Family, health problems, accidents involving my children, my wife.
Ecological and climate crises, empathy, upheaval.
Defining what matters.
2018 · Commitment as necessity.
Commitments that are not chosen.
Values and Knowledge: demand and resistance. Responsibility: towards whom, towards what.
Reflexivity: personal and professional.
2025 · Creation of the Nitrogen Observatory.
The need to transform and to account for.
Experiments and new frameworks.
Creation, pleasure, sharing.
Making knowledge differently.