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.
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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?”