Gabriel Richet was emeritus professor of renal medicine at University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He was born in Paris during the First World War into a medical family. He was the fourth in a famous line of academic medical doctors, all professors at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, including his grandfather Charles Richet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for the discovery of anaphylaxis. He was a student at the prestigious high schools Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand, and he received his medical teaching at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris.
Gabriel Richet was 23 years old at the outbreak of the Second World War. He had just passed the highly competitive "Concours de l'Internat" (residency examination) when he was enlisted and actively participated in the French military campaign. After a short time as a prisoner of war in Germany , he returned to Paris as a physician in the Paris hospital system. The Richet family was actively engaged in the resistance movement against the German occupation of France. His father, Charles Richet, was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, his brother Olivier to Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen Belsen, his cousin Jacqueline Richet-Souchère to Ravensbrück, and his mother, Marthe, was jailed at Fresnes outside Paris. Soon after the liberation of Paris in 1944, Gabriel Richet served under the high command of General De Lattre de Tassigny, and later as a doctor of the French commandos during violent fights in the area of Colmar. He was injured, received three military citations, and was decorated with the award of “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur” by Général de Gaulle in April 1945.
On his return to civilian life, Gabriel Richet joined the department of Louis Pasteur Valléry-Radot, where he met Jean Hamburger. This meeting changed their professional life, and together they established in 1950 at Necker Hospital the first French department of nephrology where they worked in concert for ten years, being among the postwar rebuilders of French academic medicine. Richet introduced treatment of acute kidney injury with the artificial kidney, which resulted in a dramatic prognostic improvement of post-abortion sepsis and crush syndrome, and with Jean Hamburger and Jean Crosnier, he developed the concept of renal intensive care aimed at correcting major fluid, electrolyte, and acid–base disorders. Introducing at Necker hospital the percutaneous kidney biopsy pioneered by Claus Brun, Richet together with Hamburger and Renée Habib contributed to clarification of the causes of uremia thanks to the routine histological diagnosis of kidney diseases, including the first studies by electron microscopy performed with Paul Michielsen. He was involved in the first allogenic kidney transplantation from a mother to her son, opening up exciting new therapeutic perspectives in living related transplantation. Richet was a highly talented investigator who contributed to the worldwide reputation of the Necker nephrology department together with other members of Hamburger’s team.
In 1961, Gabriel Richet moved to Tenon Hospital, at that time a small peripheral hospital where he was appointed chief of nephrology and accompanied by his first two assistants, Claude Amiel and Raymond Ardaillou, later joined by Liliane Morel-Maroger, Françoise Mignon, Jean-Daniel Sraer, Pierre Verroust, Pierre Ronco, Eric Rondeau, and many others. “We had nothing. I found myself in the same situation as Hamburger when he arrived at Necker in 1951, but I had learned from all the successes and failures we had been through”. Richet built a new hospital wing thanks to institutional sponsors (Assistance Publique, INSERM, CNRS and the University of Paris), and fully succeeded in his goal of making the nephrology center at Tenon Hospital a place of national and international excellence as well as an intellectual haven, a foyer intellectuel, as he used to call it. It is impossible to count the number of fellows and visiting faculties from all over the world who trained or did research in the multilingual and multicultural Tenon community, where Richet provided support and guidance to each, while leaving the freedom for all to develop their own projects. All who worked with him would consider him a father figure, a position that he accepted and filled with a lot of humour and joviality.
Richet never spoke of the prizes and honours he received, or of his own scientific achievements. He rather spoke of the scientific successes of his department. But he had his own research group within the INSERM (the French NIH) unit which he directed from 1966 until 1985, and was proud of their discovery of the ‘dark cells’ of the collecting duct, now called intercalated cells.
He was one of the early giants of French and international nephrology and a founding member of the International Society of Nephrology (ISN). He served as a president of the Francophone “Société de Néphrologie” from 1972 to 1974. Among his many roles in ISN leadership, he was co-general secretary of the ISN’s first Congress in Geneva and Evian in 1960, and ISN president from 1981 to 1984. He received many awards, including honoris causa degrees, the prestigious Jean Hamburger Prize of the ISN in 1993, and the Jean Hamburger medal of the “Société de Néphrologie” in 2004. Gabriel Richet was elected as a member of the French “Académie nationale de medicine” in 1980, and he was appointed a “Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite” (2003) and “Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur”(2013), two of the highest civil distinctions in France.
On his retirement in 1985, Richet left the legacy of a clinical and research nephrology centre of the highest reputation among the international nephrology community. But even more importantly, he left a message of hope and beauty, inspired by his critical, ironic and benevolent approach to humankind and the need for an attitude of perennial discovery. The end of his last interview probably is the best way to depict this tall, green-eyed, charming old gentleman: “A doctor is a man who decides; when he writes out a prescription, he orders…. But is it possible to give an order and decide without heart? Unfortunately, many do not share my opinion, but that’s life….. I am like the Queen of Holland whose motto is:”I will maintain”.
He is survived by his second wife Claude, by two daughters Marie-Claude and Isabelle, and a bunch of grandchildren.
