François Jacob, 1920–2013

Inspiration struck François Jacob in a Paris movie house in 1958. Bored by the movie, the biologist began daydreaming about how genes might operate within a cell. As he and his wife left the cinema, he said, “I think I’ve just thought up something important.” His idle thought, once backed by research, would go on to win him the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965.

Born in Nancy, France, Jacob was studying medicine in Paris when World War II broke out, said The New York Times, and he fled occupied France to fight under Gen. Charles de Gaulle against the Nazis. He served as a medical officer alongside Allied troops in Tunisia, Libya, and his home country, and was badly injured in a German bombing raid in 1944. After the Allied victory, he returned to his studies as a decorated veteran, but wounds to his hands made surgery impossible. “At a loss for what career to pursue,” he began working in an antibiotics lab, and eventually joined a team of biologists studying the emerging field of genetics at the Pasteur Institute.

Jacob set his mind to solving a “major biological puzzle,” said NationalGeographic.com. Why do genes sometimes make proteins, and sometimes not? “In the darkness of the Paris movie theater, Jacob hit on an answer.” Genes carry repressor proteins, parceling out genetic information to different cells like an electrical circuit board. His subsequent research on this theory was “the first crucial step to understanding how life can use the genome like a piano, to make a beautiful melody instead of a blaring cacophony.”

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Jacob remained at the Pasteur Institute until his retirement, in 1991, said Slate.fr. He saw himself as a humanist as much as a geneticist, in pursuit of “the meaning of the life and death of man.” His goal, he said, was to discover “the core of life.” He once stated his consuming interest this way: “How did this person develop, this ‘I’ whom I rediscover each morning and to whom I must accommodate myself to the end?”