Jean-Pierre Lecocq

Jean-Pierre Lecocq
Jean-Pierre Lecocq (about 1990)
Born	(1947-07-17)17 July 1947 Gosselies, Belgium
Died	20 January 1992(1992-01-20) (aged 44) Mont Sainte-Odile, Alsace

Jean-Pierre Lecocq (17 July 1947 – 20 January 1992) was a Belgian molecular biologist and entrepreneur.

Lecocq was born in Gosselies/Charleroi but grew up in Nivelles. In 1965 he received a scholarship to study Chemistry at the Free University of Brussels. In 1969 he graduated with honors (avec grande distinction). Starting in 1969, he worked on his doctoral thesis in the laboratory of Prof. René Thomas, Département de Biologie Moléculaire, on the interactions between a prokaryote (Escherichia coli) and a virus (bacteriophage lambda). He identified new bacterial genes influencing the decision between the lysogenic cycle and lysis and he analyzed mutants of RNA polymerase. From 1974 to 1975 Lecocq was drafted into the military, but returned to research to finish his PhD in 1975 with summa cum laude (la plus grande distinction). Until early 1977, he continued working at the Free University in Brussels as a post-doc (Chargé de Recherche) with short research stays in the USA (Madison, Wisconsin) and Canada (Laval University, Quebec).

From 1977 to 1980, in the early years of the rapidly developing field genetic engineering, Lecocq was project manager in the Department of Genetics of the pharmaceutical company SmithKline RIT, in Rixensart, Belgium, where he set up a molecular biology laboratory and directed the research on vaccines against enteropathogenic E. coli strains, and hepatitis B virus.