Michel Jouvet
French scientist researched REM sleep and developed a drug used to keep soldiers awake during the Gulf War
MICHEL Jouvet who died recently aged 91, was one of the first researchers to describe Rapid Eye Movement sleep, the crucial stage when the brain dreams and processes experiences.
REM sleep was discovered by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago in 1953. But it was Jouvet, in the early 1960s at the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, who mapped out the brain structures that generate it. He compared the discovery of REM sleep to finding “a new continent in the brain”.
He also coined the alternative term “paradoxical sleep”, because the brain is alert and thrumming with electrical activity — as if awake — while the body is asleep and the muscles limp or “atonic” (meaning an absence of muscle tone). The muscles of the eye, however, are excluded from this general paralysis, and the eyeballs periodically flit from side to side.
REM sleep is found in all warm-blooded mammals and birds. Jouvet discovered it initially in cats, and later studied penguins, which stay awake for long periods during the breeding season. He implanted an expensive radio-telemetry chip in an emperor penguin in Antarctica, but the valuable research subject was released into the sea and eaten by a killer whale.
Michel Valentin Marcel Jouvet was born at Lons-le-Saunier in Jura, eastern France, on November 16, 1925. During the war he was a resistant in the maquis of the Jura. After studying at Lyon medical school he qualified as a doctor, specialising in neurobiology, neurosurgery and neuropsychiatry.
He spent a year working in neurophysiology at Veterans’ Hospital at Long Beach, California, before returning to continue his work at Claude Bernard University, where in 1968 he was appointed professor and director of the department of experimental medicine. He, also at various stages, carried out research at the laboratory of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), also in Lyon, and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
In 1959 Jouvet published the first paper in the medical literature to define the “death of the central nervous system” during a coma as measured by an electroencephalograph, called “brain death”.
His researches moved on to classifying the stages of sleep into two cycles, telencephalic (or slow wave) and rhombencephalic (or paradoxical). It was then that he identified the pons as the brain structure in cats that paralysed the muscles during paradoxical sleep. “I soon realised,” he said in 2014, “that there were periods of rapid activity, similar to wakefulness, when the animal did not seem to be awake.”
Jouvet differed from some scientists over the purpose of REM sleep, believing that the dreams were not primarily a means of consolidating memories but rather “a periodic reinforcement process aimed at maintaining the genetic basis of personality”.
Later, in collaboration with Lafon laboratories, he developed the analeptic drug modafinil, which could keep a patient awake, and combat narcolepsy, without the addictive properties of older stimulant drugs such as amphetamines.
Jouvet proposed a military application for the new pill, claiming in 1991 that modafinil “could keep an army on its feet and fighting for three days and nights with no major side-effects”. It was reported that the French Foreign Legion’s crack troops used modafinil during covert operations during the Gulf War.
He published more than 400 academic papers as well as books including a novel, The Castle of Dreams (1992), The Paradox of Sleep (2000) and an autobiography, De la science et des reves: Memoires d’un onirologue (2013).
In 1992 he was awarded the gold medal of the CNRS.
He is survived by four children. © Telegraph