Didier Raoult

He specialised instead in infectious diseases, in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Paul Legendre (1854–1936).

Didier Raoult (born 13 March 1952) is a retired French physician and microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases.

Raoult was born on 13 March 1952 in Dakar, French West Africa (present-day Senegal).

Raoult's father, who came from Brittany, was serving there as a military doctor; his mother, originally from Marseille, was a nurse.

His family returned to France in 1961, and settled in Marseille.

He was for a time schooled in Nice, then attended a boarding school in Briançon.

A poor student, Raoult repeated a year at high school, then dropped out in the second year of high school to board a French merchant ship called Renaissance and spent the next two years at sea.

In 1972, he sat his baccalauréat in literature as an independent candidate, and registered at the medical school in Marseille.

Believing in a family tradition in medicine, Raoult senior refused to pay for his studies in any other subject.

Raoult had wanted to become an obstetrician after qualifying, but his grade in the resident's examination was too low for that choice.

In 1982, Raoult married psychiatrist and novelist Natacha Caïn (born 1960).

They have two children, and Raoult has an estranged daughter from a previous marriage, angiologist Magali Carcopino-Tusoli.

He taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University (AMU), and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university.

Of the 1,836 articles published by Raoult between 1995 and 2020 (amounting to over 120 a year, or approximately one article every three days), 230 were published in two journals edited by Michel Drancourt, who was his right-hand man at the IHU and a close collaborator for over 35 years.

Staff members have editorial positions at almost half the journals that have published Raoult's work.

The funding of French health institutes according to their number of publications has been suggested to be at the root of his large number of publications.

In 2006, Raoult and four co-authors were banned for one year from publishing in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), after a reviewer for Infection and Immunity discovered that four figures from the revised manuscript of a paper about a mouse model for typhus were identical to figures from the originally submitted manuscript, even though they were supposed to represent a different experiment.

From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes.

He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite the lack of evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposition from NIH and WHO to its use for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients.

As of 2024, nine of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and another 55 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.

From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes, (URMITE; in English, Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit), which employs more than 200 people.

He retired in the summer of 2022, after being allowed to stay on for at most one year after retiring from his professor position on August 31, 2021.

As of 2008, he was "classified among the ten leading French researchers by the journal Nature, for the number of his publications (more than two thousand) and for his citation number".

Raoult was awarded the Grand prix de l'Inserm in 2010 and in 2015 shared the €450,000 prize of the Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D. of the Institut de France with biologist Chris Bowler from the Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

The bacteria genus Raoultella was named in his honor by his right-hand man and longest-serving collaborator, Michel Drancourt.

Raoult initiated the construction of a new building to host the Institut hospitalo-universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection.

Since 2013 he has been one of the overseas scientists co-affiliated with the King Abdulaziz University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, known to "offer highly cited researchers lucrative adjunct professorships, with minimal requirements for them to be physically present, in return for being listed by them as a secondary affiliation", and so increase its own institutional citation index.

According to ISI Web of Knowledge, he was the most cited microbiologist in Europe in 2014, and the seventh worldwide.

According to the Thomson Reuters source "Highly Cited Researchers List", Raoult is among the most influential researchers in his field and his publications are among the 1% most consulted in academic journals.

He is one of the 99 most cited microbiologists in the world and one of the 73 most highly cited French scientists.

He is a world reference for Q fever and Whipple's disease.

As of January 2022, he had over 194,000 citations and an h-index of 197.

He is also on the list of the 400 most cited authors in the biomedical world.

Raoult is also one of the 7.3% most self-cited authors, more than 25% of his citations coming from papers he co-authored.

Yet, Raoult's extremely uncommon and high publication rate results from his "attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute", a practice that has been called "grossly unethical" by Steven Salzberg.

The IHU Mediterranée Infection, which opened in early 2017, is dedicated to the management and study of infectious diseases and combines diagnostic, care, research and teaching activities in one location.

In May 2022 the French drug safety agency ANSM announced it would file charges against the IHU for potentially criminal research misconduct during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June 2022, ANSM implemented "a series of particularly severe sanctions" against the Raoult-led IHU.

In September 2022 it was reported that Raoult's laboratory was being investigated by the Aix-Marseille University for “serious malfunctions,” that in response to this "scientific misconduct investigation by the University of Aix Marseille" four papers from Raoult's group appearing in journals published by the American Society for Microbiology had received expressions of concern, and that a criminal investigation had been initiated.

Raoult has more than 2,300 indexed publications.