Francois Jacob
Francois Jacob
François Jacobwas a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through regulation of transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth17 June 1920
CountryFrance
inventor
Nature is a tinkerer, not an inventor.
next-day answers world
For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future.
evolution
Evolution is a tinkerer.
anxiety profession
I had turned my anxiety into my profession.
real ignorance race
The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.
giving association novelty
It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.
science limits world
Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.
shadow fiction magazines
The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations.
looks produce function
One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future.
thinking important
I think I’ve just thought up something important,
hope giving one-day
It is hope that gives life meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better.
dream two cells
The dream of every cell is to become two cells.
real drawing imagination
Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality.
night impact competition
In today’s vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.