Jacques Monod (biologist)

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Jacques Lucien Monod (born February 9, 1910 in Paris , † May 31, 1976 in Cannes ) was a French microbiologist, biochemist, molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner.

Life

Monod was the son of a French painter of Huguenot descent, Lucien Hector Monod , and his American wife from Milwaukee . In 1917 the family settled in the south of France . There Monod graduated from high school in Cannes and returned to Paris in 1928 at the age of 18, where he began studying at the Sorbonne .

During his studies, George Teissier , André Lwoff , Boris Ephrussi and Louis Rapkine were his teachers. In 1931 Monod finished his studies and became an assistant in zoology at the natural science faculty of the University of Paris , where he received his doctorate in 1941. For some time he was at the Californian Institute of Technology (later Caltech ). With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , Monod was able to extend his stay in California a little.

Back in Paris in 1938, he married the archaeologist and orientalist Odette Bruhl . With her he had two sons, Olivier Monod and Philippe Monod .

After taking an active part in the Resistance during the war , he joined the Pasteur Institute immediately afterwards in 1945 . In 1967 he moved to the Collège de France . Monod graduated from Rockefeller University in New York in 1970 with the title Dr. hc honored. In 1971 he was appointed director of the Pasteur Institute.

Jacques Monod died at the age of 66. He was buried in the Cimetière du Grand Jas in Cannes .

In his honor, a biological institute at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) bears the name Institut Jacques Monod (IJM).

Molecular Biology Research

Based on the experimental elucidation of the sugar metabolism of bacteria , he developed a mathematical model in 1949 to predict cell growth as a function of the concentration of certain substrates , the Monod kinetics .

Together with François Jacob he developed the operon model. This describes the structure of prokaryotic genes and explains how their activity is regulated ( gene regulation ). In 1965 he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine together with Jacob and André Lwoff .

With the allostery theory, Monod made important contributions to the field of enzyme research in 1965 together with Jeffries Wyman (1901–1995) and Jean-Pierre Changeux .

Philosophical contributions

In addition to his molecular biological work, Monod dealt with current philosophical questions of his time, including historical materialism and dialectical materialism , both of which he rejected as a mixture of belief in progress and animism . He was friends with the philosopher Karl Popper , who dedicated the French edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies to him in 1978 .

Towards the end of his life, Monod wrote in the widely acclaimed coincidence and necessity assay, a summary of his insights into the evolution of life and its possibly hidden meaning and goal.

Monod differentiates between the physical and the cultural evolution of life. In his opinion, physical evolution emerged from the random self-organization of atoms and molecules under given energetic equilibrium conditions. The interaction of these various molecules produced self-reproducing cells with a stable, program-controlled metabolism over a very long period of time . During their blueprint typically in the form of highly organized complexes of deoxyribonucleic acid is implemented (DNS), the metabolism is done by derived from the DNA complex protein molecules , their specific chemical and catalytic activity of the linear, from the spontaneous spatial convolution in random sequence from amino acids constructed Macromolecules results. The term necessity from the title of Monod's book refers to the specific effect of these protein molecules . Minor, random errors that occur in the copies of the DNA during cell division lead to variants of the protein molecules derived from them. A selection process decides which of these variants will be retained in future generations of cell reproduction and thus possibly make an evolutionary contribution. According to Monod, the selection process consists exclusively of the fact which cell variant can survive numerically under given external conditions.

According to Monod, with the emergence of man and his intergenerational exchange of information made possible by language and writing, a cultural evolution was added to this physical evolution, which has considerably overtaken physical evolution in speed. The power that intelligence gave man over nature has made him his worst enemy. The intraspecific struggle for life and death was added as a new selection factor. The realization of one's own finitude gave rise to an anxious search for myths about man's position in the world. But only the new scientific thinking , which developed with the modern scientific revolution from around the year 1600, made it possible to find the truth objectively . Since then, according to Monod, the “old covenant” of traditional animistic values, the unity of belief and knowledge , has been broken. Man, a product of chance , has finally awakened from his “millennial dream” to “recognize his total abandonment, his radical strangeness”. "He now knows that he has his place like a gypsy on the edge of the universe, which is deaf to his music and indifferent to his hopes, sufferings or crimes." According to Monod, there is only one duty for humans: the ethics of Knowledge , the constant search for objective truth accompanied by doubt. Man is exposed to this duty in free choice. "It is up to him to choose between the kingdom [of truth] and darkness [of myth]."

other activities

In addition to being a biologist, Monod was a fine musician and distinguished writer of the philosophy of science. During the Second World War he was, like his half-brother Philippe Monod (1900-1992), a political activist and participated in the military resistance of the Forces françaises libres against the German Empire . He was temporarily a member of the French Communist Party , but withdrew from it in 1948 at the time of the Lyssenko affair.

In 1971 Jacques Monod was one of the founding members of the women's rights organization Choisir la cause des femmes, alongside Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi .

Honors

Fonts

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Monod, Jacques Lucien. 2005, p. 1005.
  2. ^ Institut Jacques Monod (IJM)
  3. ↑ J. Monod, J. Wyman, JP Chaneux: On the Nature of Allosteric Transitions: A Plausible Model , Journal of Molecular Biology 12 (1965) 88-118
  4. ^ Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity. Philosophical questions in modern biology . DTV Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag 1979, chap. IX: The empire and the darkness
  5. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed March 22, 2020 .

Web links

Commons : Jacques Monod  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Monod, Jacques
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Monod, Jacques Lucien (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 1976
Place of death Cannes