The French Medal of Honour, the highest French order of merit, was bestowed upon Croatian biologist Miroslav Radman at a ceremony in the Adriatic city of Split on Thursday evening.

During the ceremony, French Ambassador to Croatia, Gael Veyssiere, said that researcher Radman was “the successor to Rudjer Boskovic”.

In a great scientific family, you, who belong to both the French and Croatian culture, are a worthy successor to the legacy of philosophers and scientists from the Age of Enlightenment, the diplomat said while presenting the medal to Radman for his pioneer research in molecular biology.

The ceremony of the conferment of the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour was held in the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences – MedILS, a life science institute founded by Radman in Split.

Radman thanked for the decoration, recalling that eight years ago, the then French president Francois Hollande declared him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Radman for approach of finding appropriate medicine for COVID-19

In his address to the press, after the ceremony, the scientist said that when it came to COVID-19, the efforts should be focused on strategies not based on finding a vaccine but rather on finding the appropriate medicines just as in the case of the struggle to combat AIDS.

In this regard he recalled the timeline in the efforts to handle AIDS, and also called for the search for chemical drugs that will be effective for novel coronavirus, making the virus impotent.

He also commented that annually, about 50,000 people die in Croatia, whereas this year COVID-9 is likely to claim about 300 lives. Therefore, he raised the question why the death of those 300 people is more important than those 50,000 deaths, calling for putting more focus also on other diseases such as cancers.

He says that “common sense is ebbing away,” everywhere including in most developed countries, If it is not so, we would not be coping with this relatively banal problem of infectious diseases in such bad manner, Radman said adding that in the past there had been much worse infectious diseases.