In Memoriam

Abstract

Did I take on that awesome gift when death parted my limp form from his protective clasp?

When I was asked to trace, in a personal way, the contributions of Jacques Monod to the origins of our present concept of induced enzyme synthesis, I chose to deal with the Monod of the pre-operon era of induced enzymes because it is a largely unknown chapter which is particularly illustrative of his creativity. This is appropriate because, in the last years of his life, Monod was intensely preoccupied with the creative process. He set the study of it as one of the goals of the Salk Institute which he helped found. In Jacques Monod, this process was characterized by taste, elegance, and parsimony.

In writing his own rather personalized curriculum vitae, Monod begins by saying:

I was born in 1910 in Paris but in 1917 my parents moved to the south of France where I spent my youth. Consequently I consider myself more of a southerner than a Parisian. My father was a painter, a vocation rare in a Hugenot family dominated by doctors, pastors, civil servants and teachers. My mother was American, of Scotch descent, born in Milwaukee; another anomaly when one considers the mores of the French bourgeoisie at the end of the last century. I came to Paris in 1928 to begin my studies in the Faculté des Sciences.

Monod then recalls his debt to his teachers, André Lwoff, Boris Ephrussi, and Louis Rapkine. He tells us that in...