[visionlist] Yves Frégnac

[CHAVANE Frederic]

Dear community,

It is with great sadness we announce the passing of Yves Frégnac on October 18, 2024, at the age of 73.

Yves dedicated most of his career to understanding the visual cortex and its intricated complexities. After graduating from engineering school in the 1970s, Yves branched out into the neurosciences, and worked under the supervision of Michel Imbert on the plasticity of the visual cortex. In addition to the highly original experimental and theoretical papers produced during this period, Yves also wrote a review of the literature on sensory plasticity, which was, and still is, an essential reference in the field (Frégnac and Imbert, Phys Rev 1984). He then started his own team and did landmark works on cortical plasticity. One of his most striking achievements back then was to elegantly demonstrate that you could change the feature selectivity of primary visual cortical neurons (being its orientation preference, its binocularity or the simple/complex nature of the receptive field) by pairing visual stimuli with electrical or iontophoretic modulation of the activity (Frégnac 1988 Nature, review in Shulz & Frégnac 1999 J Neurobiol). At the launch of his laboratory in the early 90s, he became  also one of the pioneers of intracellular recordings in the cat V1 in vivo, an approach  that has been mastered by a handful labs in the world, which he used to reshape what was known about the way neurons process visual stimuli in the visual cortex (Graham et al, 1998 Nature ; Bringuier et al, 1999 Science ; Monier et al, 2003 Neuron).

In 2000 he created a research unit (the UNIC laboratory) where he gathered several teams, theorists and experimentalists in the same place, creating a vibrant community. It is hard to describe the incredibly stimulating atmosphere of the UNIC laboratory. One of the distinctive features of Yves’s laboratory was to blend experimental and theoretical approaches, put theorists and experimentalists in the same room, have memorable lively discussions where new ideas would sparkle. Yves was always striving for the most original ideas, the most thought-provoking experiments, the smartest ways to make progress. Working with him was a challenge, difficult but very stimulating - nothing was superficial. He was always willing to discuss, challenge ideas, especially around generous invitations in a good restaurant with a good bottle of wine.

Yves understood early on that the complexity of the brain sciences could only be tackled through an uncompromising exchange between these disciplines. He also understood that the neurosciences were being played out at an international level, and needed to be equipped with instruments for broader collaboration based on shared scientific convictions. To this end, he was quick to launch and coordinate large international consortia with the Human Frontier Science Program, then with Europe's FET and ITN programs SenseMaker, Facets, Facets-ITN, Brain-i-nets et BrainScales, programs which were at the origin of Human Brain Project. On this latter project, he clearly and courageously expressed a difference of opinion throughout the years warning of the risk of a neuroscience “speculative bubble burst” (Frégnac & Laurent 2014 Nature, Frégnac 2017 Science, 2021 eNeuro, 2023 eNeuro).

Overall, Yves was an aesthete of complexity, a multi-faceted world that he navigated with fascinating ease and simplicity. In Yves, there was an assumed complexity in the eloquent sharing of his knowledge that could intimidate as well as fascinate. There was profound complexity in the skillful discussion and development of his innate scientific rhetoric. There was uncompromising complexity in his scientific approach, where the theoretical had to clothe the empirical and the empirical had to feed the theoretical. There was meticulous complexity in his production of science, whether in his unrivalled ability to spot the dodgy detail, in his tireless search for the angle of analysis that hits the nail on the head, or simply in the almost literary rendering of his intense scientific argumentations. There was a unique complexity in the richness of his artistic, sensory and, in particular, chromatic sensibilities. For many of us, we have lost a mentor and a friend to treasure in our science and in our hearts.

With sorrow,

Olivier Marre and Frédéric Chavane
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