François Jacob (born 17 June 1920 in Nancy, France) is a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
François Jacob is the only child of Simon and Thérèse Jacob. An inquisitive child, he learned to read at a young age. At seven he entered the Lycée Carnot, wh...
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François Jacob (born 17 June 1920 in Nancy, France) is a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
François Jacob is the only child of Simon and Thérèse Jacob. An inquisitive child, he learned to read at a young age. At seven he entered the Lycée Carnot, where he was schooled for the next ten years; in his autobiography he describes his impression of it: "a cage". He describes his father as a "conformist in religion", while his mother and other family members important in his childhood were secular Jews; shortly after his bar mitzvah he became an atheist.
Though interested (and talented) in physics and mathematics, Jacob was horrified at the prospect of spending two additional years in "an even more draconian regime" to prepare for higher study at the Polytechnique. Instead, after observing a...
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