Farewell to Prof. Dr. Antoine A. Degrémont (15 October 1938 – 22 April 2025

Antoine (Tony) Degrémont's passion for biology and ecology was ignited in his youth. As a young boy standing on the dusty tennis court in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a small town in the northeast of France, he was hitting balls over the net when a scarab beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) fell from the sky onto the red sand of the court. Antoine Degrémont gently picked up the insect, turning it carefully in his hands to admire its shimmering bluish shell. “From that moment on, I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to biology,” Degrémont later recalled.

The sacred scarab lives off the dung of grazing animals. It cuts large portions from fresh dung heaps, forms them – relative to its size – into huge balls, and laboriously pushes them along the ground. For Degrémont, the scarab became a symbol for his own life: “Il faut vraiment pousser pour arriver à quelque chose,” he said.

At the age of 16, Degrémont had completed his secondary school diploma. The son of an engineer, he wanted to break free from the bourgeois confines of his family and study biology in Paris. However, a family acquaintance advised him to take a different path: without a medical degree, one could not become a good biologist, he said. Degrémont never felt truly at ease: “Everything was focused on competition, not cooperation,” he recalled. After completing his studies, a job advertisement in Iran sounded like a promise to him. A physician was sought to care for 700 French workers building a new railway line in the Shah’s Iran. In 1961, he moved into a railway carriage for almost a year, set up a practice, and treated the workers. It was there that he first witnessed the vast social inequalities. He realised that health was shaped not only by dangerous or bothersome pathogens, but above all by social background, economic inequality, and political decisions. From then on, he understood health and disease as systemic issues.

His military service in France was only a brief interlude. His innate urge to travel soon led him to Mossaka Hospital in Congo-Brazzaville. The prefecture that Degrémont was responsible for was as large as Switzerland. The work in the hospital was exhausting; the wards were hopelessly overcrowded. Degrémont was on duty day and night, operating, doing ward rounds, training local staff. In addition, he oversaw the entire prefecture, travelling by pirogue across the region, treating malaria and pneumonia, meeting with local leaders and fishermen. “I enjoyed the friendship and mutual respect with the local population, a friendship that never required me to change who I was.” Often, essential medicines were missing, as was a kitchen to feed the patients. It was the surrounding population – and sometimes Degrémont himself – who provided food, even hunting buffalo at weekends. Leaving Congo was very hard for him. In 1965, he returned to Paris, obtained a diploma in biology (specialising in immunology, parasitology and bacteriology) and opened a tropical medicine practice, caring especially for the health of migrants. But he never felt truly comfortable in the French capital.

Luckily, Claude Lambert, the developer of Ambilhar, proposed Degrémont as project leader for the Mangoky Project (1966–1971) in Madagascar. The project involved a major clinical trial in a high-risk area for schistosomiasis in Bas-Mangoky. The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) financed the endeavour and Swiss TPH, under its then-director Rudolf Geigy, was tasked with its implementation.

In 1972, Rudolf Geigy brought Degrémont to Swiss TPH, first as head of medical research, and later as head of the Department of Medicine. Under his leadership, diagnostic services, travel advice, and project evaluation developed rapidly. Above all, he showed his colleagues the importance of shifting from purely biomedical research towards public health and global health.

Degrémont’s ideal was always a holistic, systemic approach: close cooperation with the local populations concerned, the training of professionals at all levels, and interdisciplinary research were at the heart of his vision. In 1987, he was appointed the third Director of Swiss TPH and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel. Degrémont encouraged flat hierarchies. In the training of health professionals, he set new national and international objectives and promoted the establishment and development of research, training, and implementation institutions in Africa, such as in Ifakara, Tanzania, and N'Djaména, Chad.

In 1997, Degrémont handed over the directorship and future development of Swiss TPH to his successor Marcel Tanner, and became the enthusiastic founding director of the Institut de la Francophonie pour la Médecine Tropicale (IFMT) in Vientiane, Laos. The IFMT was a unique training institution in a country that lacked local health expertise. Every year, 15 to 20 students from Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and southern China were enrolled in the Master's programme "Tropical Health". After graduation, they were able to manage healthcare provision in their districts. At the IFMT, Degrémont was one of the first in global health to introduce new digital teaching methods.

After his retirement in 2003, the Formelli farmstead in Petroio, Tuscany – 30 hectares of land and forest that he and his wife Christine had fully restored from 1988 onwards – became the centre of his life. They farmed the dry land, planted olive and nut trees, and undertook reforestation. “I am a farmer, an adventurer, and a doer,” he often said with a laugh. Formelli Petroio became the long-awaited return to his roots. Degrémont always knew where he came from, but he never lived in the past – he lived in the present and the future, inspiring and carrying us all along with him. Thus, Antoine Degrémont will continue to live with and within us.

On the afternoon of 22 April 2025, in the midst of his work at Formelli, a rich and fulfilled life came to an end.

Marcel Tanner