Tabassome Simon, the pharmacologist who is afraid of nothing

Tabassome Simon was still a little girl of "11 or 12 years old" in Tehran before the 1979 revolution. She had just won a reading competition organized by the radio. When a journalist asked her who she would like to become, "an Oriana Fallaci [the Italian journalist whose book on the Vietnam War she had chosen] or an Albert Schweitzer?" , she replied: "No, I want to be Tabassome, I would like to be known for what I am," she recalls. Mission accomplished! Fifty years later, she is head of the clinical pharmacology department at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris (AP-HP), professor at the Sorbonne Faculty of Medicine and coordinator of the clinical research platform in eastern Paris.

"But what, you don't know Tabassome Simon?" It was the early 2000s, and Nicolas Danchin, who had left the Nancy hospital to head the cardiology department at the brand new Georges-Pompidou European Hospital in Paris, was introduced to the pharmacologist. "We worked together quite quickly on numerous research projects," explains the retired professor. He describes her as "a workaholic who made a lot of enemies because she was honest and spoke her mind."

Gabriel Steg, head of the cardiology department at Bichat (AP-HP) , says he was approached in the same way in the early 2010s: "You absolutely have to meet Tabassome Simon, I can't do anything without her," Nicolas Danchin is said to have told him. Since then, there have been countless articles co-signed by these three medical researchers in major scientific journals.

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