A professor of histology, embryology, and cytogenetics, he was the fourth president of the European Patent Office (EPO) from 1 July 2004, to 30 June 2007.

He hold tenures at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

From 1999 to 2004, he served as a spokesman on research and space policy on the French Economic and Social Council.

[5] As a member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1999, he was particularly concerned with the EU Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, with the preparation of the Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions ("gene patent directive"), and with bioethical issues as well as in innovation policy.

On 30 June 2004, the day before becoming president of the EPO, he and Albert-Claude Benhamou were granted EP 1358481 , filed on 16 March 2001, for a "Device for in situ analysis and/or treatment consisting of a flexible rod and a micro-system fixed at one end of said flexible rod".

[6] Between 1990 and 2004 he was professor in charge of a number of medical services at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul hospital, in Paris, where in 2005 a collection of 351 foetuses and still-born babies was discovered.