Michel Luc

Michel Luc (7 February 1927 – 18 January 2010) was a French zoologist (nematologist) and one of the founding father of the field of plant-nematology. He spent his career with ORSTOM (Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer), now IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement). He created the first French nematology laboratory in the ORSTOM research station of Adiopodoumé, near Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in 1955, and a second nematology lab at Dakar Bel-Air (Senegal) in 1969. In 1978, he launched the Revue de Nématologie (soon renamed Fundamental and Applied Nematology) that fused with Nematologica in 1999 to become Nematology, currently the leading scientific journal in the field. He was a world-renowned authority on nematode taxonomy.

Biography

Michel Luc was born on 7 February 1927 in Tunis (Tunisia). From 1945, on, he studied biology in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he attended classes delivered by biologists such as Georges Mangenot in Botany and Pierre-Paul Grassé in Zoology. After earning a Licence de Sciences Naturelles in 1948, he was hired as a trainee (élève) at ORSTOM in 1950. He died on 18 January 2010, a few days after his wife, Mariette Luc.