The environmental and health protection commitments of Jean‐François Muller: Academic and societal endeavor

During our careers, we met Jean-François Muller essentially in the context of scientific meetings and PhD examination panels, in relation with the use of Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometry. However, one of us (PCM) * had also the opportunity to meet him in a less well-known aspect of his implication in societal activities related to the monitoring of air quality. In this recollection of Jean-François Muller, we would like to recall how his science has also served societal causes. A brief look at his scientific works shows how much his academic carrier was devoted to health, safety, air quality, and environment.1-19 A number of his published works show his commitment concerning workers exposition to health and safety.6, 7, 12, 14 We would like to stress that Jean-François Muller dedicated a significant part of his academic research and social commitment to air quality, in particular the characterization of dust particles. In this regard, he and his followers20 appear as forerunners in the domain of characterization of airborne particles. His academic research gave him the key expertise to participate fruitfully to the governance of the local observatories constituting the backbone of the French national network dedicated to the monitoring and improvement of air quality. Since 2012, the monitoring of air quality is operated in France by one approved organization for each administrative region. But before, the monitoring was gradually organized to cover more restricted area, historically starting with the most industrialized zones, sources of the major pollutions at that time, and then evolving to growing conurbations in link with local and transboundary traffic for which the Mosellan axis is a paramount example. In 2005, Jean-François became vice-president of AERFOM,21 then president of the association ATMO, for Lorraine Nord Air Quality in 2007.22 During his duties as deputy mayor of Metz, he was designated as rapporteur for the validation of the regional atmosphere protection plan, in relation with the AERFOM association.22 In recent years, fine and ultrafine particles (UFPs) became the focus of modern air quality research.23-25 The implication of particulate matter (PM), currently those of aerodynamic diameter below 10 and 2.5 μm (PM10 and PM2.5, respectively, concentrations given in μg/m3), as air pollutants are integrated at the right place in the collection of environmental factors to which an individual is exposed and which have an effect on health, known under the name of “exposome.”26, 27 Actually, these last years, the studies tend to focus on UFPs (aerodynamic diameter below 0.1 μm),25, 28 for which the health effects are more severe than for PM2.5 and PM10, and, due to the fact that UFPs contribute very little to the PM mass, automatic analyzers measuring particles number concentration (p/cm3) and also their size distribution are nowadays implemented by the monitoring observatories. Exposome studies rely in large part on mass spectrometry for analytical26 and biomedical27 purposes. In this context, it should be stressed that mass spectrometry has a prominent role to play for operational pollution mitigation by allowing the apportionment of the various sources and focusing the actions on the most pertinent causes. If we take account of the emergence of the problems of microplastics and the various aerosols, we can foresee a central role of mass spectrometry, in particular when combined with laser desorption and ionization, for the characterization of PM and their biological effects.29 Jean-François Gal and Pierre-Charles Maria contributed equally to the writing of the original draft and to the review and editing. We acknowledge the continuous support from the Institut de Chimie de Nice, UMR CNRS 7272. The peer review history for this article is available at https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1002/rcm.9938. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.