The University of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture will award the 2017 Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal to a foundation begun by the late pro-life French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune.

Lejeune, who died in 1994, was internationally known for his staunch support of pro-life causes. The Catholic physician and researcher was one of the three discoverers of the extra chromosome that causes Down's Syndrome.

But he became unpopular among fellow-geneticists for insisting that abortion was wrong. After giving a talk on this subject at a major event, Lejeune wrote in a letter to his wife: "Today, I lost my Nobel prize in Medicine".