Jacques Arnould
Born in 1961 in Lorraine, a few weeks before Yuri Gagarin’s flight, Jacques Arnould still has, through his family roots, a little straw in his clogs…
The Apollo saga fascinated him like so many little boys of his age, spellbound by the black-and-white pictures on television screens or the colour ones in children’s magazines — yet it hardly influenced his choice of career. From a pharmacist grandfather he no doubt inherited an interest in biology and, the straw helping, he trained as an agronomist at the national institute in Paris devoted to the field, before adding a forestry finish at the dedicated school in Paris and Nancy. Leaving the mysterious shade of the woods behind, he became a theologian and devoted his thesis to the questions that the sciences of evolution raise for the notion of Creation. He was then offered, by the French space agency CNES, the task of developing ethical reflection within it.
Wandering with curiosity between the teeming world described by Darwin and his successors and the staggering one observed by telescopes and probes, he enjoys taking part in the questions of his fellow scientists and engineers, astronauts and pilots — without forgetting to set down on paper, with some pleasure, the fruit of those exchanges and reflections.
