Every October thereafter, a Nobel vigil would begin at the Pasteur in anticipation of each year’s Prize announcement.
Monod could not be too disappointed about not winning. After all, Watson and Crick had still not won the Prize, and their enormous discovery was now seven years old. Monod’s work, including all that he had accomplished with Jacob, was much younger. Indeed, some of it was still in gestation and needed to be delivered.
THE WRITING OF their opus entitled “Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms in the Synthesis of Proteins” consumed the fall of 1960. It was a comprehensive review of the state of knowledge concerning the crucial question of how protein synthesis is controlled. The article was also much more—it was an extraordinary display of the hypothetico-deductive scientific method.
Monod had mastered the style in previous papers. The presentation took the form “If X is true, then Y should be observed. But Z is what we observe, so X must not be true, and an alternative A must be considered.” And then the ramifications of A would be examined in turn. Throughout their article, as Monod and Jacob addressed each scientific question, they explicitly stated each alternative hypothesis, enumerated the predictions made under each hypothesis, and reviewed in detail the experimental evidence that then either corroborated or falsified each hypothesis. After drawing each major conclusion, the scientists moved on to the next issue. Their new picture of gene regulation was thus built up piece by piece, thoroughly reasoned conclusion by thoroughly reasoned conclusion, illustrating the roles of all of the entities they had imagined, discovered, and named in the previous three years (repressor, operator, operon, structural gene, regulatory gene), plus one more. Although Jacob’s work with Brenner on “X” RNA was not yet even written for publication, he and Monod incorporated that crucial new evidence into their synthesis. The Frenchmen introduced a new term for the unstable RNA intermediate between DNA and protein: “messenger RNA.” (For further details and an overview of the science in the book, see Appendix.)
After the rigorous, exhaustive development of their model for gene regulation in bacteria, the two men were keen to make sure that the wider implications of their work for other great mysteries were appreciated. They drew attention to cell differentiation and embryonic development in particular. In animals, for example, liver cells make different proteins than do kidney cells, skin cells, or other cells, but each cell type generally contains the same DNA, the same collection of genes, or “genome.” They drew the connection to the fundamental problem of embryonic development and once again framed how the central issue is “to understand why tissue cells do not express, all the time, all of the potentialities inherent in their genome.” Monod and Jacob suggested that their discoveries in bacteria applied to this general problem because just as bacterial genes are repressed when they are not needed, the genes that distinguish each cell type are thus somehow repressed in other cell types. They would later summarize that assertion with the quip “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of Elephants.”
The duo pressed to complete and submit the manuscript before breaking for the holidays. Finally, on Christmas Eve, they finished writing and sent the article to the editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology, the leading chronicle of the still-young discipline.
While most articles in the journal occupied fewer than a dozen pages, Jacob and Monod’s treatise would command thirty-nine pages, by far the most of any paper in the journal’s history or for the next many years.
It would be a watershed in modern biology.
The novelty and breadth of their ideas, the elegant logic, and the general explanatory power of their model made an immediate and powerful impact. What Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix had done to reveal the structure of genes and the mechanisms of inheritance, Jacob and Monod’s synthesis did for illuminating how genes were regulated. They were virtually assured that Nobel Prizes were in their future as well.
Their masterful synthesis also marked personal milestones for each scientist. For Monod, it was exactly twenty years since his fateful discussion with Lwoff in December 1940, when he first learned the term “enzymatic adaptation,” and after which he resolved to devote himself to understanding the phenomenon. Now he had done just that.
For Jacob, the achievement coincided with the anniversaries of two pivotal moments in his life. It had been twenty years since the young medical student fled France in the agony and chaos of her defeat, perhaps never to return. And it had been ten years since Lwoff admitted the naïve, inexperienced, and wounded would-be physician into his laboratory.
LATE IN THE afternoon on that cold, gray Christmas Eve, Jacob stepped out of the laboratory onto the snow-covered sidewalk of rue Docteur Roux. He turned left in front of the original institute building erected by Pasteur himself, the snow muffling the sounds of his footsteps on the empty street. As he wound his way home and passed by other landmarks of the past decade of his life in his beloved city, he reflected on the improbable journey that had brought him to that moment.
He turned right onto boulevard Pasteur and left onto the rue de Vaugirard. The streets were now crowded with Parisians finishing their Christmas shopping. Jacob then strode past the Gare Montparnasse, where General von Choltitz had glumly surrendered Paris to “his general” Leclerc on August 25, 1944—a historic moment that Jacob had missed as he lay in a body cast in Cherbourg. He then turned right onto the boulevard Montparnasse and headed toward the movie theater in which he’d had his revelation that summer day in 1958. After he passed La Coupole but before he reached La Closerie des Lilas or the Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he spent Christmas Eve 1944, Jacob turned left toward the Luxembourg Gardens.
The side streets were again deserted. He entered the gardens, and the snow began to fall again, adding to the pure white blanket that covered the grounds. As he approached rue Guynemer, where his apartment overlooked the gardens, darkness fell. The streetlamps and other lights again cast their magic spell across Paris, his home, and still the most beautiful city in the world.
Epilogue
French Lessons
THE WORLD IS NO SECRET FOR THE WISE MAN. WHY DOES HE NEED TO STRAY INTO ETERNITY?
—ALBERT CAMUS,
NOTEBOOK III
CHAPTER 34
CAMUS IN A LAB COAT
I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deed, by the consequences caused in life by their presence.
—ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
THE ANNUAL PASTEUR OCTOBER NOBEL VIGIL ENDED AT ONE P.M. on Thursday, October 14, 1965, when Monod, Jacob, and Lwoff each received telegrams from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm informing them that they were to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of enzyme and viral synthesis.”
They were the first French Nobel laureates in science in thirty years, since Frédéric Joliot and Irène Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, shared the 1935 Chemistry Prize. In breaking the long drought, the three molecular biologists instantly became celebrities. Paris-Presse’s full-page headline blared:
MAGNIFIQUES, NOS 3 “NOBEL”
[Our amazing Nobel Three]
The newspaper’s lead article described “The beautiful and hard adventure of three Frenchmen who are a team in life as in their work,” and the front page carried a picture of the new laureates beaming for the camera.
The trio had not simply revived French scientific pride; the press also seized immediately on their activities during the war. France-Soir trumpeted the “marvelous history of the three French friends” on its front page, and highlighted Monod and Lwoff’s activities in the Resistance and Jacob’s membership in the Compagnons de la Libération. It showed pictures of Monod, rope in hand and cigarette in his mouth, sailing on his boat with his son Philippe; Jacob with his wife, Lise, and children; and Lwoff with his wife, Marguerite, holding up one of Lwoff’s paintings.
Brilli
ant scientists, brave patriots, family men, rugged sailors, and talented artists to boot—the press could not have imagined better copy. Unlike Camus, who had long been famous when he won the Prize and thus endured a heavy dose of backbiting, the scientists were up till that moment largely unknown outside of academia and received only praise and admiration (except from the Communists, of course). The press’s images and stories of the three gallant Pastorians transformed them into national figures.
Requests for interviews flooded in to the Pasteur. Each man was soon called upon to opine upon all sorts of scientific, political, and even philosophical matters. Of the three, no one was more inclined or prepared to hurl himself into the fray than Monod. Indeed, just after the Nobel announcement, Monod sat down for a long interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, a new weekly magazine cofounded by Jean Daniel. Monod stated at the outset his conviction that receipt of the Nobel Prize carried with it a responsibility—one that he immediately began to fulfill in a startlingly frank and wide-ranging interview that became the cover story in the very next issue.
Monod’s coronation as Nobelist marked not only the culmination of his long scientific quest but also the beginning of a new chapter in his life as a public figure, a period during which the deep influence of his friend Camus on his worldview was acknowledged repeatedly, and articulated in his internationally acclaimed, bestselling book-length essay, Chance and Necessity. Monod said, for example, “Camus’s existentialism, in the widest sense, is exactly that which I share.” Through his public commitments to human rights, individual freedoms, and indeed even the necessity of rebellion, Monod emerged as a new incarnation of his friend Camus, albeit in a lab coat.
Moreover, Monod went so far as to explicitly adopt and to expand upon Camus’s philosophical positions. When Camus died, the New York Times had described the central theme of his work as “the proper response of the thinking man to the plight that is posed by the gift of life.” Monod wholeheartedly embraced Camus’s response and added to that foundation a scientific perspective, one gained from the new molecular biology that had revealed the deepest secrets of life.
COMMITMENTS
Before Monod and his fellow laureates had even reached Stockholm to collect their honors, the trio made their first major commitment—to accept the joint presidency of the Honorary Committee of the French Movement for Family Planning (Le Mouvement Français pour le Planning Familial, or MFPF). While the contraceptive pill had been available in the United States since 1961, it remained illegal in France. In fact, the prescription, the sale, and the advertisement of all contraceptives were banned by a 1920 law that sought to boost France’s birthrate after her devastating losses in World War I.
The ban had been maintained with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, of course, but also the French Communist Party as well as the medical establishment. PCF leader Maurice Thorez objected to measures that limited the potential growth of the working class: “Communists condemn the reactionary notions of those who seek to limit births and seek thereby to turn the working class away from its struggle for bread and socialism.” The medical community took the view that their role was to treat sick patients, not healthy ones, so birth control was not perceived as a medical matter. The ban on information about birth control was so strict that French gynecologists completed their training without even learning of the advances in contraceptives.
As a consequence of the unavailability of simple contraception, abortion, although also illegal, was common, with an estimated 400,000 to 800,000 procedures occurring each year—a figure equal to the number of live births. Horrified at the medical risks of abortion and the myriad consequences of unwanted pregnancies, Dr. Marie-Andrée Lagroua Weill-Hallé founded the organization Happy Motherhood (Maternité Heureuse) in 1956 to arouse national awareness. The initiative gathered momentum with the growing support of physicians and morphed into the MFPF.
Shortly after the announcement of their Nobel Prize, Weill-Hallé asked Monod, Jacob, and Lwoff for their support. In accepting her invitation, the trio explained the reasoning behind their endorsement. Opposition to birth control was based on religious and political ideologies. The scientists could not abide any laws that placed ideology over science and personal freedom. This rationale was one to which Monod would return often, and with much force, in the coming years. They wrote:
Because of scientific and technical developments, the laws which govern relations among men can no longer be founded on an ethic dating back more than twenty centuries. One of the fundamental values of a modern, advanced society is the liberty of the individual under the law. Such a society cannot allow that women live as slaves to outdated principles.
When the movement that you lead reaches its objectives, many women and men will know a more harmonious and balanced existence, many tragedies will be avoided, in particular thousands of secret abortions, even the existence of which is a condemnation of a society.
Those who oppose you and ignore the hard reality, the tragedies, the mutilations and deaths, carry a heavy responsibility. No one should have the right to sacrifice the happiness, the health, or the life of another human being to their own personal principles, however sincere and noble they may be.
Monod was soon asked to contribute a preface to a book on the biological and psychological aspects of contraception. He seized the opportunity to applaud the authors, to register his contempt for the 1920 law, and to point out the gulf between the state of science and the outdated ethics that rejected its advances: “Many of our fellow citizens who are still poorly informed will be, I do not doubt, enlightened by reading your book. They understand that a law, which could be interpreted as repressing the dissemination of scientific information or as prohibiting doctors from acting according to their knowledge and their conscience, would be contrary to the ethics of a modern society and even to the principles of our law.”
Thanks in large measure to the campaign by the MFPF, the ban on contraceptives was lifted by passage of the Neuwirth Act in late 1967.
MONOD’S VISIBILITY GREW quickly. Perhaps the most revealing reflection of his new stature involved the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Paris at the end of March 1966. Dr. King, who had received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his leadership of the civil rights movement in the United States and for his commitment to nonviolence, was making a tour of Stockholm, Lyon, and Paris to raise funds for his efforts.
Had Camus been alive, there would have been no more likely candidate to first introduce Dr. King to a Paris audience. The honor went instead to Monod. He rose to the occasion in front of a star-studded audience of nearly five thousand at the Palais des Sports on March 28, 1966:
“The Country of the rights of man.”
“The land of liberty.”
These are the beautiful names that their history, and the aspirations of their culture have earned France and America.
Yet, who would dare say that human rights have always been respected, in France or by France, and if they are even today fully assured?
And again, who could say that the equality of all citizens, guaranteed by the constitution of the United States, is the case in fact, in mores, or even at times, in the application of the law?
If however these two Nations, France and America, could acquire … these true titles of glory—it is because they have always found among their citizens men ready to devote their talent, their energy, their entire life, even at sometimes heartbreaking cost, to the defense of liberty and what is right.
The man that I have the distinguished honor of introducing this evening is such a man. He is the Reverend Martin Luther King.
Reverend King has devoted his life to the cause of his brothers, the blacks of America. He is not the first. He is not the only one. In the United States, thousands of men, black and white, are engaged in this immense effort.
Among them however, Reverend King enjoys an incomparable standing, a unique authority that is derived from his high moral pos
ition and politics. Defender and leader of his brothers, he was able to guide them not only in what circumstances required, but also while respecting the freedom, dignity, and the rights of all people. This is what the most beautiful of all Nobel Prizes, the Peace Prize, recognized in 1964 in this disciple of Gandhi.
After Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Monod was called upon again, this time to eulogize King at a memorial service organized by the Movement Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, and for Peace (Mouvement Contre le Racisme, l’Antisémitisme, et Pour La Paix) at the Cirque d’Hiver. Monod resurrected his comparison to Gandhi and revealed that King had confided his expectation to be assassinated:
Jacques Monod shaking hands with Coretta Scott King at the Palais des Sports in Paris, March 29, 1966. Monod introduced King to the audience. Two years later, he eulogized King at a memorial service after King’s assassination. To Monod’s left are actress Simone Signoret, singer Harry Belafonte, and actor Yves Montand. (AFP/Getty Images)
Twenty years ago, on January 30, 1948, Gandhi, liberator of India, was assassinated by a Hinduist fanatic. The bloody skin of this scrawny old man sheltered one of the greatest souls that enlightened our terrible century. Such souls are immortal; we knew that when the powerful figure of Martin Luther King was revealed to us by his preaching, his fight for man, for his freedom, for his dignity. Gandhi’s soul had found a body. A body that was vigorous yesterday is today cut down. Twenty years after his master, and like him, Luther King has become the martyr for which he was prepared. I know that: he told me so.
Monod praised King’s adherence to nonviolence and reminded his audience that the sort of humiliation and injustice suffered by American blacks had also occurred on French soil. He then challenged his audience:
Brave Genius Page 49
