Thierry de la Villejegu

Board Member, Jerome Lejeune Foundation USA
Executive Director, Jerome Lejeune Foundation France

By joining the Jerome Lejeune Foundation after more than twenty years in the marketing industry, I responded to the desire to serve human life.

Widower, mourned by the death of a child, my personal experience had exposed me to the great fragility of life0. It led me to ask myself the question of the place that the medical profession and scientific progress accorded to man.

It seemed to me that it was time to embrace this cause. I did not know that besides the satisfaction of devoting myself to it, I would obtain such a source of unity and freedom.

In the case of down syndrome, I discovered the inexorable drama of the fate reserved for unwanted human beings because their trisomy, while simultaneously scientific and medical research loosened the lock of this disease by opening therapeutic perspectives.

Beyond the drama of down syndrome I met luminous people, I think of my god-daugther Ines, and admirable families of courage and strength, doctors and researchers determined to support life.

Bizarrely, by successive shifts of consciousness, down syndrome had become the revelation of an enormous aberration of our health and thought systems. The eradication of trisomic children betrayed, it seems to me, the exhaustion of our society.

By joining the Foundation’s extraordinary team, I knew that I was invited to make a contribution to this fight against the fatality of sickness and disability and to let myself be re-enchanted by the hope of helping to save of human lives.

When I was a young student at Sciences Po (political science institute of Paris), I wanted to serve the values ​​of justice and fraternity in my country.

Thank you dear “trisomics” to allow me to respond to this aspiration.