Hervé Chneiweiss

Hervé Chneiweiss is a neurologist and neuroscientist, MD-PhD, Research Director at the CNRS. He is currently head of the research centre Neuroscience Paris Seine – IBPS (CNRS /Inserm/Sorbonne University) and PI of the Glial Plasticity team. First trained as a neurologist (gait and movement disorders, Parkinson), he was involved in the neurogenetics of human diseases such as cerebellar ataxias. His scientific work was then dedicated to the biology of astrocytes and their roles in brain tumour origin and progression. His team contributed in recent progress in identifying cell-intrinsic mechanisms orchestrating brain tumour cells plasticity, some leading to on-going clinical trials. He has authored more than 150 academic papers.

He is also involved in bioethics, presently head of the Inserm Ethics Committee (IEC), member of the International Committee of Bioethics of UNESCO (2014-2021) and former member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE, 2013-2017). He wrote several books or chapters on bioethics of human embryos, human genetics and neurosciences. On the basis of an opinion of the IEC in 2015 on genome editing he was an active promoter of a european initiative “Fostering Responsible Research with Genome Editing Technologies: A European Perspective”, Hirsch et al. Nature 2017 and Chneiweiss et al. Transgenic Research 2017 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11248-017-0028-z) that resulted in the international association ARRIGE (Association for Responsible Research and Innovation in Genome Editing. Vice-President: https://arrige.org/). 

Declaration of interests

He is the Chair of the Inserm Ethics Committee that has produced a report on the subject area. He is also vice-president of ARRIGE, the Association for Responsible Research and Innovation in Genome Editing which was launched in March 2018.