ZAGREB, October 9, 2020 - The French Medal of Honour, the highest French order of merit, was bestowed upon Croatian biologist Miroslav Radman at a ceremony in the Adriatic city of Split on Thursday evening.

During the ceremony, French Ambassador to Croatia, Gael Veyssiere, said that researcher Radman was "the successor to Rudjer Boskovic".

In a great scientific family, you, who belong to both the French and Croatian culture, are a worthy successor to the legacy of philosophers and scientists from the Age of Enlightenment, the diplomat said while presenting the medal to Radman for his pioneer research in molecular biology.

The ceremony of the conferment of the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was held in the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences – MedILS, a life science institute founded by Radman in Split.

Radman thanked for the decoration, recalling that eight years ago, the then French president Francois Hollande declared him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Radman for approach of finding appropriate medicine for COVID-19

In his address to the press, after the ceremony, the scientist said that when it came to COVID-19, the efforts should be focused on strategies not based on finding a vaccine but rather on finding the appropriate medicines just as in the case of the struggle to combat AIDS.

In this regard he recalled the timeline in the efforts to handle AIDS, and also called for the search for chemical drugs that will be effective for novel coronavirus, making the virus impotent.

He also commented that annually, about 50,000 people die in Croatia, whereas this year COVID-9 is likely to claim about 300 lives. Therefore, he raised the question why the death of those 300 people is more important than those 50,000 deaths, calling for putting more focus also on other diseases such as cancers.

He says that "common sense is ebbing away," everywhere including in most developed countries, If it is not so, we would not be coping with this relatively banal problem of infectious diseases in such bad manner, Radman said adding that in the past there had been much worse infectious diseases.

As Slobodna Dalmacija/Sandra Barcot writes on the 5th of May, 2019, the world-renowned scientist Miroslav Radman is set to bring around a hundred scientists from across the world to Split. The international group of scientists will be part of the second International Progress in Biomedical Research conference.

From June the 17th to June the 21st, at Split's "Mediterranean Institute for Life Research" (MedILS), numerous respected experts from various areas of importance to human health will discuss, share experiences, and get better acquainted with the latest research on the extension of human life, the finding of remedies for the treatment of diseases that pose a serious threat to human life, and further educate themselves in general.

Split will play host to the leading scientists who will hold lectures on the molecular and cellular biology of diseases, with special emphasis placed on the fields of neuroscience, immunology, the metabolism, and diseases that is responsible for the misery, suffering and deaths of many in the modern day - cancer.

The participants of this year's conference in Split will focus on the concepts and challenges within each of these scientific areas through lectures on the latest technologies in genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, cancer signaling, therapy development, DNA recovery and immunotherapy.

The conference is organised by the Mediterranean Institute for Life Research and the University of Toronto, more specifically by Professor Miroslav Radman (MedILS), Professor Mladen Merćep (MedILS) and Professor Igor Štagljar (University of Toronto).

The first conference of its sort, which was held in July last year in Split, also gathered together some one hundred scientists from the field of biomedical research dealing with the topic of understanding the function of the gene, the therapeutic importance of the gene, ie the gene for extending human life and the aging of human skin.

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Click here for the original article by Sandra Barcot for Slobodna Dalmacija