François Jacob (1) (1920–2013)

François Jacob was born to a Jewish family in Nancy, France. His parents were Thérèse (Franck) and Simon Jacob, a businessman. When he was a small child, the family moved to Paris, and at age seven, he entered the Lycée Carnot, where he was educated for the next 10 years. Although he was interested and talented in physics and mathematics, he went to medical school at the University of Paris. His studies were interrupted at the end of his second year in June 1940 by Nazi Germany's invasion of France in World War II. He escaped to London by boat to join the Free French Forces under General Charles de Gaulle, and fought for four years as a medical officer in North Africa and France. For his service, he was named a Companion of the Liberation (Croix de la Libération), the highest French military distinction of the war, as well as the Légion d'honneur and the Croix de guerre. After recovering from injuries sustained in a German air attack, Jacob returned to medical school, graduating in 1947 with a thesis on the effectiveness of the antibiotic tyrothricin against local infections. In the same year, he married Lysiane Bloch, a pianist, with whom he had four children. He became a researcher in microbiologist André Michel Lwoff's laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in 1950. Four years later, he earned a doctoral degree in science at the Sorbonne. In 1956, he became laboratory director and in 1960 was selected as head of the Department of Cell Genetics. In 1961, Dr. Jacob and Jacques Monod explored the idea that the control of enzyme expression levels in cells is a result of regulation of transcription of DNA sequences. Their experiments and ideas gave impetus to the emerging field of molecular developmental biology, and of transcriptional regulation in particular. With Lwoff, the two scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for their work. Dr. Jacob became a professor at the Collège de France and continued to work on gene regulation in the 1960s and 1970s. His influential landmark book The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (1974), became a classic work. In 1987, he published his autobiography, La Statue Intérieure (The Statue Within). In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Jacob received the Grand Prix Charles-Léopold Mayer from the Académie des Sciences in France in 1962, and was named to a seat in the Académie française in 1996. He also won the Mendel Medal that year. He was elected a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Philosophical Society.