弗朗索瓦·雅各布1920—2013

雅各布后来又与悉尼·布伦纳（2002年因线虫研究而获得诺贝尔奖）提出了核糖体进行转译时的作用方式假说，并由后来的实验证实。1996年，雅各布成为法兰西学术院院士。2013年4月19日逝世。

François Jacob (French: [ʒakɔb]; 17 June 1920 – 19 April 2013) was a French biologist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis". He and Monod originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through regulation of transcription. For his work in the French Resistance, he received the Cross of Liberation, the Légion d'honneur and Croix de guerre.

He wrote popular science, and in 1994 received the inaugural Lewis Thomas Prize.

Early years

Jacob was born the only child of Simon, a merchant, and Thérèse (Franck) Jacob, in Nancy, France. An inquisitive child, he learned to read at a young age. Albert Franck, Jacob's maternal grandfather, a four-star general, was Jacob's childhood role model. 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 was antagonized by rightist youth at the Lycée Carnot around 1934. 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 surgical operation that cemented his "slight interest" in medicine, he entered medical school.

During the German occupation of France—and on the heels of his mother's death—Jacob left France for Great Britain to join the war effort. Jacob, who had only completed his second year of medical studies, joined the medical company of the French 2nd Armored Division in 1940. He was injured in a German air attack in 1944 and returned to now-liberated Paris on 1 August 1944. For his wartime service, he was awarded France's WWII highest decoration for valor, the Cross of Liberation, as well as Légion d'honneur and Croix de guerre.

After his recovery, Jacob returned to medical school and began researching tyrothricin and learning the methods of bacteriology in the process.

Research

In 1958, Monod was watching a film with his wife and told her "I think I’ve just thought up something important." In 1961 Jacob and Monod explored the idea that the control of enzyme expression levels in cells is a result of regulation of transcription of DNA sequences. Their experiments and ideas gave impetus to the emerging field of molecular developmental biology, and of transcriptional regulation in particular.

For many years it had been known that bacterial and other cells could respond to external conditions by regulating levels of their key metabolic enzymes, and/or the activity of these enzymes. For instance, if a bacterium finds itself in a broth containing lactose, rather than the simpler sugar glucose, it must adapt itself to the need to 1) import lactose, 2) cleave lactose to its constituents glucose and galactose, and 3) convert the galactose to glucose. It was known that cells ramp up their production of the enzymes that do these steps when exposed to lactose, rather than wastefully producing these enzymes all the time. Studies of enzyme activity control were progressing through theories of the (allosteric) action of small molecules on the enzyme molecule itself (switching it on or off), but the method of controlling the enzyme production was not well understood at the time.

With the earlier determination of the structure and central importance of DNA, it became clear that all proteins were being produced in some way from its genetic code, and that this step might form a key control point. Jacob and Monod made key experimental and theoretical discoveries that demonstrated that in the case of the lactose system outlined above (in the bacterium E.

Honours and awards

• 1962 Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer by the Académie des Sciences
• 1964 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod
• 1969 elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences
• 1969 elected to the American Philosophical Society
• 1973 Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS)
• 1996 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
• 1996 Académie Française Seat 38