Francois Jacob memorial

Dr. Francois Jacob is one of a handful of the 20th century's most distinguished life scientists. His research with Dr. Jacques Monod, like that of Watson and Crick, provided the foundations for understanding mechanisms of genetic regulation of life processes such as cell differentiation and defects in diseases. Jacob joined the College de France in 1964 and shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1965 with Jacques Monod and Andre Lwoff. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) USA in 1969. Jacob was born in 1920 in a French Jewish family; his grandfather was a four-star general. He began to study medicine before World War II, in which he served as a military officer in the Free French Army and was badly wounded in an air raid. He received numerous high military honors. Then he commenced research in the laboratory of Andre Lwoff, earned an MD, started a life of research at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, in 1950, and received his Doctorate in Science in 1954. He had two marriages and four children. He died at age 92. Dr. Jacob's initial major contribution was to determine positions of genes on DNA. His model was Escherichia coli. As discovered …