François Jacob · Science & Medicine
Awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for discovering the operon model of gene regulation.
17 June 1920, Nancy — 19 April 2013, Paris
Nancy, Paris
François Jacob is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for discovering the operon model of gene regulation.
Origins and early life
François Jacob (1920-2013) was born in Nancy, the only child of Simon Jacob, a merchant, and Thérèse Franck; his mother and the family around him were secular Jews, and shortly after his bar mitzvah he became an atheist.
Work and career
For his work in the French Resistance he received the Cross of Liberation, the Légion d'honneur and the Croix de guerre. With Jacques Monod he originated the idea that the level of enzymes in a cell is governed by the regulation of transcription: their 1961 work on the lactose system of the bacterium Escherichia coli — the operon model — showed how genes are switched on and off, one of the founding results of molecular biology.
Recognition
Jacob, Monod and André Lwoff shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis. Jacob also wrote for the general public, and in 1994 received the inaugural Lewis Thomas Prize, which honours the scientist as poet.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for discovering the operon model of gene regulation.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
Similar Contributors
Gerty Cori
Michael S. Brown
André Lwoff
David Julius
Edmond Fischer
