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| Published by Harvard University Press |
It is thanks to François Jacob that I began to understand
what evolution meant at the molecular level, when I read his wonderful book Le jeu des possibles (The possible and the actual), more than
ten years ago. And “Evolution is tinkering”, Jacob’s catchphrase, is with me
ever since.
Jacob, now 92 years old, began his scientific career after fighting
in World War II, and studied lysogenic phages in bacteria at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris. There he met Jacques Monod, starting one of the most
fruitful collaboration of the 20th century. Their work on genetic
regulation in E. coli culminated in a
Nobel Prize in 1965. In addition to their revolutionary contribution to
molecular biology, Jacob and Monod also wrote books of great importance and large
outreach, notably Chance and necessity
(Monod) and The logic of life
(Jacob).
Of flies, mice, and men1 (1998) is his last book
to date, a personal journey across biology that spans several decades. The
different chapters feel a little bit disconnected, because apparently they were
first written as lectures for different occasions, but the book is very
enjoyable. Jacob is one of these great scientific figures with a real literary
culture, one who can invoke Dino Buzzatti and ancient greek myths, the poets
Paul Valéry and John Keats, or Tolstoy.
