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Jacques Monod Quotes

Jacques Lucien Monod , a French biochemist, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".Monod became famous for his work on the E. coli lac operon, which encodes proteins necessary for the transport and breakdown of the sugar lactose . From their own work and the work of others, he and Jacob came up with a model for how the levels of some proteins in a cell are controlled. In their model, the manufacture of proteins, such as the ones encoded within the lac operon, is prevented when a repressor, encoded by a regulatory gene, binds to its operator, a specific site on the DNA next to the genes encoding the proteins.

Study of the control of expression of genes in the lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system. Monod also suggested the existence of mRNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology. Monod's interest in the lac operon originated from his doctoral dissertation, for which he studied the growth of bacteria in culture media containing two sugars.

✵ 9. February 1910 – 31. May 1976
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Famous Jacques Monod Quotes

“What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn’t really get to interesting results; let’s talk in terms of general systems theory … there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it’s impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless.”

Jacques Monod

Monod (1974) "On chance and necessity". In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky, (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. cited in: Brian R. Gaines (1979) " General systems research: quo vadis? http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~gaines/reports/SYS/GS79/GS79.pdf", General Systems, Vol. 24 (1979), p. 4

“A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.”

Jacques Monod

Monod (1974) On the Molecular Theory of Evolution

“One day, almost exactly 25 years ago - it was at the beginning of the bleak winter of 1940 - I entered André Lwoff’s office at the Pasteur Institute. I wanted to discuss with him some of the rather surprising observations I had recently made.
I was working then at the old Sorbonne, in an ancient laboratory that opened on a gallery full of stuffed monkeys. Demobilized in August in the Free Zone after the disaster of 1940, I had succeeded in locating my family living in the Northern Zone and had resumed my work with desperate eagerness. I interrupted work from time to time only to help circulate the first clandestine tracts. I wanted to complete as quickly as possible my doctoral dissertation, which, under the strongly biometric influence of Georges Teissier, I had devoted to the study of the kinetics of bacterial growth. Having determined the constants of growth in the presence of different carbohydrates, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to determine the same constants in paired mixtures of carbohydrates From the first experiment on, I noticed that, whereas the growth was kinetically normal in the presence of certain mixtures (that is, it exhibited a single exponential phase), two complete growth cycles could be observed in other carbohydrate mixtures, these cycles consisting of two exponential phases separated by a-complete cessation of growth.”

Jacques Monod

Introduction
From enzymatic adaptation to allosteric transitions (1965)

“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.”

Jacques Monod

Monod (1971) Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. p. 180

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