From the abortion pill to the fight against aging: who was Etienne-Emile Baulieu, who died at 98?

From the abortion pill to the fight against aging, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, who died Friday, May 30, 2025 at the age of 98 , placed social issues at the heart of his research, which earned him worldwide recognition.

"I have always tried to combine science and progress, applications useful to the well-being of Man," declared the man who called himself a "free researcher."

The office of the Inserm unit at the Kremlin-Bicêtre University Hospital, which he continued to occupy even into his nineties, bore witness to the prolific character of this scientist, open to the world, laden with prizes and a professor at the Collège de France.

"If I didn't work anymore, I think I'd be bored."

In this cabinet of curiosities were piled African masks, works by Pasteur, sketches of the human brain, sculptures given by his friend Niki de Saint-Phalle...

"If I didn't work anymore, I think I'd get bored," he told AFP in March 2023, then aged 96.

A close friend of Andy Warhol, this literature enthusiast said he was "fascinated by artists who claim to have access to the human soul, something that will forever remain beyond the reach of scientists."

The son of a nephrologist who died when he was only 3 years old, Etienne-Emile Baulieu was born on December 12, 1926, in Strasbourg, under the surname Etienne Blum. Surrounded by two sisters, he was raised by his mother, a former lawyer and staunch feminist .

Having taken refuge in Grenoble during the Second World War, he took the name Emile Baulieu, then Etienne-Emile Baulieu, and joined the Resistance with the Francs-tireurs et partisans at the age of 15.

After the war, he began a dual university course in science and medicine and specialized in the study of steroid hormones.

"Anti-hormone"

Invited to work in the United States, he was noticed by Gregory Pincus, the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to work on sex hormones .

A shrewd politician, this scientist also taught him the importance of networks and "knowledge-raising" to advance his research and his struggles.

Etienne-Emile Baulieu would become an expert in the field, not hesitating to publicize his discoveries and use his connections to obtain funding, arousing some jealousy in the hushed world of laboratories.

Back in France, the doctor discovered an "anti-hormone" which opposes the action of progesterone, essential for the implantation of the egg in the uterus.

The RU-486 molecule , developed in 1982 by the Roussel-Uclaf laboratory with which he partnered, is a safe and inexpensive drug alternative to surgical abortion.

The battle for its commercialization has only just begun.

Dragged before the courts, demonized by the powerful American anti-abortion leagues who accuse him of having invented a "death pill", this father of three children stands firm and forces Roussel-Uclaf to give in, having given up on distributing it.

"Adversity rolls off him like water off a duck's back," producer Simone Harari Baulieu, whom he married in 2016, told AFP.

In 1988 , Health Minister Claude Evin ordered the laboratory to market the pill, arguing that it was the "moral property of women."

DHEA and Alzheimer's

The following year, Etienne-Emile Baulieu received the Lasker Prize , considered the antechamber to the Nobel.

In the years that followed, he tirelessly tried to convince other governments to authorize the distribution of RU-486.

When the right to abortion was challenged in 2023 in the United States, he denounced "a step backward " betraying "fanaticism and ignorance."

At the same time, he resumed his work on DHEA, a natural hormone that he believed could delay aging. He described its secretion by the adrenal glands in 1963.

Highly publicized, his research showed limited effects (firming of the skin, reduction of depression, improvement of libido).

Despite these disappointing results, Professor Baulieu, who admitted to using them himself, has made old age his new hobbyhorse.

Still active long after retirement, in 2008 he founded the Baulieu Institute to fund research into delaying the onset of dependency.

In 2010, at the age of 83, he was still publishing work he and his team had done on a protein that could play a role in fighting Alzheimer's disease . "There's no reason we can't find treatments," this great optimist told AFP.