Justine Sergent

Dr. Justine Saade-Sergent
Born Lebanon
Residence Montreal, Canada
Institutions McGill University
Alma mater McGill University

Justine Saade-Sergent (March 31, 1950 - April 11, 1994)[1] was a researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience. She received her PhD from the McGill University. She was an associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University from 1979 - 1982.[2] She had one student, Dalbir Bindra.[3]

Sergent was considered a top scientist in her field, until she was anonymously accused of violating research ethics. The stress of the attack on her character and on her research was so much that she and her husband committed suicide together less than two years later. Three years after death, the inquiry was unable to come up with any evidence of fraud.

Early life

Justine Saade was born March 31, 1950 in Lebanon. While teaching there, she met her later-to-be husband Yves Sergent. He brought her back to back to France where they married. Justine Saade-Sergent later enrolled at McGill University where she earned her bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.[4]

Research

"Justine Sergent was one of the first researchers that brought forth evidence towards the functional neuroanatomy of face processing. She described the Fusiform face area or FFA in 1992.[5]

"Using positron emission tomography (PET), Sergent found that there were different patterns of activation in response to the two different required tasks, face processing verses object processing." [6]

This processing area was later named by Nancy Kanwisher in 1997[7] "who proposed that the existence of the FFA is evidence for domain specificity in the visual system".

Scandal and Death

In July 1992 Sergent was accused of violating ethical research procedure in an anonymous letter. She was accused of failing to get approval from an ethics committee for her research on the brain function of pianists.[8] The research included the use of a Positron emission tomography or PET scan, which requires the injection of radioactive isotopes. Sergent's response was that she thought that the approval she had already received maintained in effect. In 1993 Sergent received a reprimand stemming from her failure to report a slight change in stimuli in her experiments to the ethics committee.

Almost two years after the first anonymous letter was sent out, several copies of another anonymous letters were sent out. The letter attempted to further discredit Sergent by linking her research conduct to the case of a Dr. Roger Poisson of St. Luc Hospital. Dr. Poisson had admitted to falsifying records in his breast cancer research.

One of these letters was received by the Montreal Gazette, and on April 9, 1994 they published an article on Sergent's 1993 reprimand. The weekend after this article was published, Sergent and her husband committed suicide together.[9]

Justine Saade-Sergent, 44, and her husband Yves Sergent, 46, were found dead in their garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. The coroner pronounced their time of death 11:40am April 12, 1994.[10] There was a suicide note citing the anonymous letter as a reason for their suicide.[11] The note was published in both the Gazette and La Presse.[12]

The inquiry into her ethical violations was suspended July 15, 1997, three years after her death. No evidence of fraud was found. [13]

Publications

Posthumous

1990s

1980s

1970s

In memoriam

See also

References

  1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9375173
  2. http://reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r2908/sergent.html
  3. http://phdtree.org/scholar/sergent-justine/
  4. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4190376&fileId=S1355617700001594
  5. Sergent J, Ohta S, MacDonald B (Feb 1992). "Functional neuroanatomy of face and object processing. A positron emission tomography study". Brain 115 (1): 15–36. doi:10.1093/brain/115.1.15. PMID 1559150.
  6. Sergent, J., Signoret, J.L. (1992) Functional and anatomical decomposition of face processing: evidence from prosopagnosia and PET study of normal subject. The Royal Society. 335, 55–62
  7. Kanwisher N, McDermott J, Chun MM (Jun 1, 1997). "The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception". J Neurosci. 17 (11): 4302–11. PMID 9151747.
  8. http://www.kwesthues.com/suicidemcgill.htm
  9. http://reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r2908/sergent.html
  10. http://www.mcmaster.ca/ors/ethics/ncehr/2003/mar2003/sergent.txt
  11. http://grandquebec.com/psychologie-quebec/suicide-mcgill/
  12. http://reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r2908/sergent.html
  13. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v101/n2/809/LR101n2Mueller.pdf
  14. http://justine-yves-sergent.org/
  15. http://www.brams.org/en/2009/05/prix_sergent_2009/
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