Professor Jerome Lejeune had discovered the genetic cause of Down Syndrome, in 1959 when he saw under his microscope in a Paris laboratory the third little mark on the 21st chromosome. But the drama of his life was that his discovery of trisomy 21 would lead to a medical holocaust, national health systems giving huge funds to track down and eliminate these children before they could be born and losing a Nobel Prize. www.mercatornet.com/articles
As he had foreseen, Lejeune was ostracized by the scientific, medical and political elite in France. His research funds were withdrawn. In the 1960s doctors had been proud to belong to the « Lejeune team », but in the 1970s it was social suicide. During the campaign to legalize abortion in France in 1975 slogans were painted on the walls of the Sorbonne : “Death to Lejeune”. His own children saw these attacks against their father. ‘If I don’t protect them, I am nothing: The man who discovered Down syndrome.
As many countries began to deny the value of life in the womb, Lejeune travelled tirelessly around the world, defending the humanity of the human person from his or her very beginning. The Eletter from the Calendarforlife.org