Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with Francois Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".
22 Facts About Jacques Monod
2.
Jacques Monod learned from other students a little older than himself, rather than from the faculty.
3.
Jacques Monod coined the term diauxie to denote the frequent observations of two distinct growth phases of bacteria grown on two sugars.
4.
Jacques Monod theorized on the growth of bacterial cultures and promoted the chemostat theory as a powerful continuous culture system to investigate bacterial physiology.
5.
The experimental system ultimately used by Jacob and Monod was a common bacterium, E coli, but the basic regulatory concept that was discovered by Jacob and Monod is fundamental to cellular regulation for all organisms.
6.
Jacques Monod made important an contribution to enzymology when he collaborated with Jeffries Wyman and Changeux to extend this concept to explain cooperative behaviour of some multi-subunit proteins.
7.
Jacques Monod was not only a biologist but a fine musician and esteemed writer on the philosophy of science.
8.
Jacques Monod was a political activist and chief of staff of operations for the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur during World War II.
9.
Jacques Monod acknowledges his connection to the French existentialists in the epigraph of the book, which quotes the final paragraphs of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus.
10.
Jacques Monod writes that this process, acting over long periods of time, is a sufficient explanation for the complexity and teleonomic activity of the biosphere.
11.
Jacques Monod describes this as an "ethics of knowledge" that disrupts the older philosophical, mythological and religious ontologies, which claim to provide both ethical values and a standard for judging truth.
12.
For Jacques Monod, assessing truth separate from any value judgement is what frees human beings to act authentically, by requiring that they choose the ethical values that motivate their actions.
13.
In 1973, Jacques Monod was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto II.
14.
Sociologist Howard L Kaye has suggested that Monod failed in his attempt to banish "mind and purpose from the phenomenon of life" in the name of science.
15.
Jacques Monod's philosophical writing indicates that he recognized the implication that such systems could arise and be elaborated upon by evolution through natural selection.
16.
Jacques Monod was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1968.
17.
The Institut Jacques Monod, funded jointly by the CNRS and the University of Paris, is one of the main centers for basic research in biology in the Paris area.
18.
Jacques Monod was born in Paris to an American mother from Milwaukee, Charlotte MacGregor Todd, and a French Huguenot father, Lucien Jacques Monod, who was a painter and inspired him artistically and intellectually.
19.
Jacques Monod attended the lycee at Cannes until he was 18.
20.
Jacques Monod was a Chevalier in the Legion d'Honneur and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the American Bronze Star Medal.
21.
Jacques Monod became a member of the French Communist Party after the end of the Second World War, but distanced himself from the party after the Lysenko Affair.
22.
Jacques Monod died of leukemia in 1976 and was buried in the Cimetiere du Grand Jas in Cannes on the French Riviera.