François Jacob, left, and Jacques Monod in 1971 (NYT)
Dr. François Jacob, a French war hero whose combat wounds forced him to change his career paths from surgeon to scientist, a pursuit that led to a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his role in discovering how genes are regulated, died on April 19 in Paris. He was 92.
Dr. Jacob said he had been watching a dull movie with his wife, Lysiane, in 1958 when he began daydreaming and was struck with an idea of how genes might function. “I think I’ve just thought up something important,” he told her.
Seven years later, Dr. Jacob shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Jacques Monod and Dr. André Lwoff, his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, for their discovery that cells can switch on and switch off certain genetic information. Their work, which focused on bacteria, increased understanding of how genes could be selectively deployed by an organism. “They’re all there in the egg. But how does the egg know when to turn from one type of cell type to another?” Richard Burian, a professor emeritus of philosophy and science studies at Virginia Tech, said of the question asked by Dr. Jacob and his colleagues. “There must be some kind of signal.”
François Jacob, Geneticist Who Pointed to How Traits Are Inherited, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com