Obituaries

Date:
1976
Reference:
PP/CRI/H/3/5/5
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Obituaries. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Jacques Monod, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1965, was director of the Pasteur Institute Jacques Monod, Nobel Biologist, Dies; Thought Existence Is Based on Chance By FRANK J. PRIAL Jacques Monod, the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist and director of the Pasteur In- at his home in Cannes, France. He was 66 years old. Dr. Monod shared the 1965 Nobel award for medicine and physiology with two colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, Fran cois Jacob and André Lwoff, for research on the workings of thè living cell, . He was probably best know: for his book-length essay, Chance and Necessity,? pub lished in 1970. In it he postu lated his chilling conviction that all existence is due tc chance and that man kind': inevitable recognition of thi: fact will necessitate a com plete revolution in human th °Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all crea tion in the biosphere, he wrote. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind lib erty is at the root of the pro digious edifice tha* Although he flirtedj briefly with Communism during World War II, he was as harsh on Marxist dialecticians as on what he called the disgusting far rago of Judeo-Christian relig iosity. 'Postulate of Objectivity' What I have tried to show, Dr. Monod told an interviewer in 1971, is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postu late that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the Now this, he went on, is basically incompatible with vir tually all the religious or meta physical systems whatever, all of which tify to show that there is some sort of harmony be tween man and the universe and that man is a product- predictable if not indispensable —of the- evolution of the ' verse. One of the great problems of philosophy, Dr. Monod said, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would s ay that all tradi tional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible, this is - that the impossibility of deriv ing a set of values—the ought from blind ' * - -imposes on mankind the obligation to choose a system of vaules by which to live. But he thought mankind -ailing to do so. There is abso lutely no dought that the risk of the race committing suicide is very great, he. said, adding, In my opinion, the future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two g< Monod said his values were based .on the entialist ethics of his friend the te Albert Camus—an eth' ised on free choice—and ;nied that his intention vt ■ create a philosophy of p mism or despair. Hero of the Resistance Indeed, his. own life belied; the sombef reflections his book —a best-seller in France 1970 and 1971—engendered, dapper, urbane man who played the cello and loved to sail, Jacques Lucien Monod v a hero of the French ance. He held both- the Croix de Guerre and the American Bronze Star. He was born in Paris in 1910, the son of Lucien Monod, a painter, and Charlotte Todd MacGregor Monod,. .a native Milwaukee. He studied at t Cannes Lycée and the Univer sity of Paris and joined th( Pasteur Institute as a zoologj instructor in 1931. He wai head of the institute'! laboratory in 1945, head of the __ work in decent conditions with a maximum of efficiency. Dr. Monod could have moved i the United States with rela ve ease. He spoke English with almost no trace of an ac cent and he was already a member of the. Academy of ' rts and Sciences; Appealed for Support In 1973, Dr. Monod visited this country in an attempt to save the Pasteur Institute from bankruptcy. He noted he had ed the staff, patented a influenza vaccine in the __ of the institute, and had appealed for both governmen tal and private support. The institute was founded by Louis Pasteur in 1888 with pub lice donations including large grants from the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey and tl Emperor of Brazil. Pasteur w¡ buried there in 1895. Eight me who worked or studied there have won JSfobel Prizes in i ine or physiology. The institute is divided _ research section and a. pharm aceutical-manufacturing section grosses more than $20 mil- in sales a year. After tak- ' 1971, Dr. Mone ' 1971. ~>r. Monod v the faculty - the University of Paris from 1959 to 1967 and a, profession * tolecular biology at the Col- de France from 1967 to 1972. He was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in 1936, and was named a nonresident fel- r of the Salk Institute in ___5 Made Offers He was a frequent and open critic of the French Government for what he saw as its parsimo nious treatment of scientific re search, particularly of research at the Pasteur Institute. _ Just after winning the Nobel Prize in 1963, Professor Monod disclosed that most of his and hits col leagues' research had been done - small, stuffy, sordid attic , and he said that all uircc of them had earlier turned down a chance to move to the United States to work. The Americans did not make this offer in order to depri-- Franr.fi of its researchers, ! :s researchers, through generosity to perm; dismissed tists and technicians, or. about 10 percent of the staff. Dr. Monod, who acknowl- running the Paste gave him no time > ago tha r Institut gave research projects, showing ' how'the 'living ceìll manufactures the substances of life. Control ¡of Protem Manufacture With Professor Jacob, he demonstrated how the cell's production of proteins 4s con trolled by a feedback process analogy to that by which ~ thermostat controls the tei perature in a room. They found that while type of gene in a cell's nucleus holds the blueprints for the sub- mces' to be manufactured, other gene regulates, the rate production, based on wheth- a given protein is in long short supply. This is ...îchanism that permits the i quired coordination of ali t molecular manufacturing ¡ tivities that are the essence . metabolism and thus of life itself. Dr. Monod was a member of the Washington Academy of Science, the Royal Society of London and the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. His wife, the former Odette Brühl, whom he married ~ 1938. died in 1972. Two st
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