J. Genet. Vol. 69, No. 3, Decenlber 1990,pp. 179-183. 9 Printed in India.

BOOK

REVIEW

The Statue Within: An autoNography By FRAI',~OIS JACOB; Unwin Hyman Limited, London; 1988; pp. 326; Price s 12.95. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series- to which Franqois Jacob's autobiography The Statue Within b e l o n g s - i s a truly outstanding collection of books by such distinguished.authors as Freeman J. Dyson, Peter Medawar, Salvador Luria and Hendrik Casimir among others. The inspiration behind the series is well expressed in the common preface to all the books in these words: "Science in this century has become a complex endeavour .... As scientific knowledge expands, the goal of general public understanding of science becomes increasingly difficult to reach. Yet an understanding of the scientific enterprise, as distinct from data, Concepts, and theories, is certainly within the grasp of us all .... Science is an enterprise with its own rules and customs, but an understanding of that enterprise is accessible, for it is quintessentially human". This series, including Jacob's book, fulfills this expressed need of "encouraging public understanding of science" most handsomely. Apart fi'om reaching the general public, these books also help bridge the gap in communication between different areas of natural science. Frangois Jacob (hereafter in his own style 'J' for short) is one of the leading French geneticists who in the 50's and 60's contributed to the founding of the science of molecular biology and bacterial genetics. With Andr6 Lwoff and Jacques Monod he won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on gene regulation. The Statue Within is a remarkable attempt to look for and capture an element of continuity running through the many eventful phases of J's life, a search for a unity behind what might otherwise seem ahnost disparate personalities, "a kind of inner statue, a statue sculpted since childhood, that gives my life a continuity and is the most intimate part of me, the hardest kernel of my being". Even though, to begin with, he declares that "I see my life less as continuity than as a series of different selves - ! might almost say, strangers". Born on 17th June, 1920, to Jewish parents of modest means, J was an only child. His father was a partner with his brothers in a family real estate firm in Normandy, while his maternal grandfather had been an army general. The absence of siblings led to J inventing in solitude many games and pastimes to occupy and amuse himself, such as for instance, a habit of carefully reconstructing mentally the world around him - bed, room, home, streets.., in all detail - upon awakening each day; wondering upon waking up fi'om sleep why one has not changed but is the same as before; a love to play with words and their sounds and invent plausible new ones and so on. He also deyeloped an extremely close relationship with his mother as well as with his grandfather le g6n6ral. In school J was pretty much a loner, an outstanding incident he recalls being the time he, all alone, stood up to and downed a bully who 179

180

Francois Jacob

had made fun of his being a Jew. The book itself (written in 1987 at age 67) begins in a rather sombre vein, with reflections on the fear of the loss of one's powers and of death, search for security as one ages, the frantic desire to not become dependent on others in the process, and hopefully to pass away before this happens. And the answer to these fears comes much later in the narrative, in the image of his children clustered around the mother: "It was like a revenge on the war, on death". The ten years in school seem to have been none too happy, what with strict discipline, compartmentalized subjects, tiresome teachers, and severe competition, though J performed well. There are exposures to instances of death, of a class fellow - the realisation that the young too can die. Then comes the decision to go in for medicine and become a surgeon, the entry to medical college in 1938. But by June 1940 his mother passes away of a cancerous tumour and soon after France falls to the Nazis - two events deeply linked in J's memory. As his forebears pass away, one by one, the feeling of being all alone slowly builds up "this sense of gradual clemolition that constitutes the apprenticeship of death". This calls to mind the simple, yet poignant sentence from R. K. Narayan: "A profound and unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life". During childhood and adolescence J had built up a sense of permanence and stability as much in nature's laws as in man's handiwork, both in objects and in the institutions created by him. An implicit belief that France was unshakeable. The onset of war shattered these ideas and assumptions, his whole world-picture collapsed. Then followed four years in exile, away from his beloved France, beginning with a few months in England. He signs up for the Free French forces under de Gaulle and is assigned to medical duty. He goes from England to Africa - a variety of places, scenes, people, atmospheres - French Equatorial Africa, Gabon, Chad, Libya, Rabat, Tunisia, Algiers. J's recollection of those years - the close experience of war, fighting first the italians and then the Germans, travel through forbidding deserts, the brushes with death and the loss of comrades - is like a series of fleeting images or snapshots, or better, of a movie with plenty of flashbacks in a loosely structured Impressionist style. These are years when he is completely cut off from family. And in this account J conveys powerfully the horrors and madness of war but also the necessity of it; the fragility of life and the chance incidents that claim one and spare another. The description of the days spent in Algiers and Casablanca brings vividly to mind memories of Bergman and Bogart. In April 1944 J leaves Casablanca for England, and a few months later, on August 1, 1944, he is finally back in France. But on the road fi'om N o r m a n d y to Paris, during an air raid, he is seriously wounded in right arm and thigh. There follows a long period of operations, recovery and Convalescence in hospitals, during which time the links with the past and with family get slowly reestablished. He has by now been forced to give up the idea of a surgeon's career, and tries to get back into medicine. The difficulties of readjusting to the aftermath of war, of returning to a 'normal' life, are great indeed. At age 26, with 'growth and studies interrupted by the years of war, J searches for a career and considers many possibilities: journalism, films, politics, civil service, the banks. There is a period of aimless wandering, of feeling lost and unsure, until he comes to the National Penicillin Centre to do a minor thesis as completion of his medical studies. This gives him his first taste of research, the pleasure of discovery, and of a competitive atmosphere not ruled by superiors. But at the same

The Statue Within: An autobiography

181

time he is acutely aware of his handicaps because of time lost. The meeting with Lise, six years younger, and their marriage, is also at about this time. The final decision to devote himself to scientific research was the result of a slow buildup, and then a flash inspired by meeting someone with similar wartime experiences, a meeting which helped remove J's hesitations and doubts about his capabilities. His choice of an area to work in - genetics, more particularly phage and bacterial genetics- was based both on intuition and on prospects of growth, and it turned out to be a wise choice. He says he was drawn to genetics because it was both basic and amenable to quantitative study. For one who later achieved so much, we are struck by the fact that he was nearly thirty when he first entered the portals of the Pasteur Institute, and that it was only after persistent requests and attempts that Andr6 Lwoff accepted him as a student in his laboratory. In time the relationship between them became as between father and son. While they were twenty years apart, the third member of the trio, Jacques Monod, was in age exactly midway between the other two. The initiation into research at the Pasteur Institute was by no means easy - i n the beginning the unthmiliarity of a new environment, ignorance of the basic scientific terms used by Lwoff, introduction to the seminar as a means of communication and criticism among research workers9 But once hooked, progress in ideas and experiments was rapid and heady. J gives us an idea of the developing field of bacterial genetics, how at the beginning there were no more than twenty-five or thirty workers worldwide, and everyone who was anyone was in touch with everyone else. We see how the problems of genetics and heredity became accessible to direct experimental study using bacteria; the opening up of whole new fields and techniques; the introduction of statistical methods by Luria and Delbrtick; the phenomenon of conjugation or "sexuality" in bacteria discovered by Lederberg and Tatum on the one hand, by William Hayes on the other; the constant stream of visitors and young workers from the United States and England, Pasadena and Cambridge; the processes and interactmns between bacteria and phages, various hypotheses being tested, saved, discarded. We read about J's collaboration with Elie Wollman on the detailed mechanism of transfer of genetic material fi'om "male" to "female" bacteria; the fashioning, out of this phenomenon, of a reliable tool for study of bacterial functions. And, as late as fall of 1957, the start of a five-year long collaboration with Monod which became the high point of J's scientific achievement, while their "friendship unfolded like an epic pomrP': the study of regulation, timing, switching on and off, of the protein-producing processes in the cell. The inspiration came from an idea conceived by J while watching a movie, which reminds one of Luria thinking of using statistical methods for phage work while playing at a slot machine. This, the most intense period of J's scientific life, appears almost towards the end of the book (the narrative in any case ending in 1960); it led to the resolution of one of the mysteries of life, one of the great wonders of the century, though even on an earlier occasion, in the collaboration with Elie Wolhnan, J had had a premonition of being on the verge of a great discovery in biology. From an initial feeling that he was entering the game rather late, J ended up being one of the leaders and innovators in a whole new branch of science. On the human side, J recounts with directness and honesty, his affairs of love, attachments and disat}pointments , at various a g e s - b o y h o o d , adolescence, young

182

F r a n c o i Jacob s

man in medical school and then in the army - until after the meeting and marriage to Lise in 1947, and the coming of Pierre, the twins Laurent and Odile, and last of all, Henri, he could finally say: "Each time I rediscovered them with a savage joy and an infinite gentleness. It was like the return of spring, the leaves once again on the trees, the sun, flowers". J gives expression to his views on the nature of science and scientific research at many places in the book. Some sentences are worth quoting: "I came to understand that, contrary to what I had believed, the march of science does not consist in a series of inevitable conquests, or advance along the royal road of human reason, or result necessarily and inevitably from conclusive observations dictated by experiment and argumentation. I found in science a mode of playfulness and imagination; of obsessions and fixed ideas". Taken together with Luria's statement: "The image of the impartial scientist uncommittedly weighing the various alternatives is a gross simplification. Scientists, like everyone else, have preferences in their work as in their lives. These preferences must not influence the interpretation of data, but they are definitely an influence on the choice of approaches", we see how very false the public image of the scientist can be! And then again J says: "This universe of research, still charged with mystery, suddenly appeared in a new light. This was not the cold, studious, stiff, slightly sad, slightly boring world one often imagines. But, on the contrary, a world full of gaiety, of the unexpected, of curiosity, of imagination. A life animated as much by passion as by logic". And yet again: "Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accumulating 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". And on the reasons for pursuing science he says: "By what necessity do men expend so much passion, take so much pleasure in eternally trying to explore the world, to interrogate it?... There are deeper reasons. There is the attempt, the temptation to understand a world that is veiled. The revolt against solitude. Against a reality that escapes you, is unaware of you, and without which there is no life .... Science meant for me the most elevating form of revolt against the incoherence of the universe. Man's most powerful means of competing with God; of tirelessly rebuilding the world while taking account of reality". He also frequently stresses the need for abstraction and model building in biology. In talking of the microscopic process of conjugation in bacteria he says: "Everything became a matter of imagination and inference. A sort of detective story .... Thus everything depended on the representation we formed of an invisible process and on the manner of its translation into visible effects." One meets interesting parallels, connections and contrasts with developments in physics in going through this book. The story of bacteriophages - "... too tiny to be seen with an optical microscope. For a long time, no one could perceive them. They were creatures of reason, hypothetical constructs, whose gambols could be followed, which could be counted only by indirect methods. Only the recent development of the electron microscope finally allowed their visualization. Showed that these ghosts had not simply been dreamed up .... " - is in some respects like the story of the neutrino in physics - hypothesized by Pauli around 1933 on grounds of theoretical necessity, but "seen" experimentally only in 1956 by Reines and Cowan. J at several places highlights the style brought in by Delbrfick h'om physics to biology: "A style that

The Statue Within: An autobiography

183

injected into biology a rigour of sustained reasoning which upto then had been the prerogative of physics; which aimed especially at forming a coherent representation of the system studied". As a point of contrast one is struck by the wtstly different time scales for experiments in tile two fields- many of J's ideas could be tested by experiments prepared in the morning, run in the afternoon, analysed by the evening or next morning at the latest; then on to the next set of ideas[ It must have been a very long time ago indeed, if ever, when experiments in physics could be completed so rapidly! There is a sincerity and modesty when J evaluates his own work in science, which remind one of Dirac in physics. For instance, J says: "It was my good luck to arrive at the right time at the right place"; and later on: "I never ceased to wonder at my having been able to approach what had long seemed an unreachable goal. At finally having obtained what, for years on end, I had not dared to hope for .... I knew my shortcomings well enough not to overindulge in dreaming and to keep my illusions within bounds. I was not unaware of the luck I had had .... " C o m p a r e this with Dirac's account of his phenomenal contributions to quantum mechanics: "Well, fi'om the initial idea of Heisenberg, one could make a fairly rapid development, a n d I was able to join in it. I was just a research student at that time. I was lucky enough to be born at the right time to make it possible for that to be so." Just as the years 1925-1930 have been called the Golden Age of Theoretical Physics, with equal justification one can call the period of the late 40's to the early 60's the Golden Age of Molecular Biology and Genetics. And in choosing to work in this field J had exhibited '~ strange mixture of ignorance and a good 'nose'!" But in recognising the contributions the many geniuses make to such an age, we must remember with Heisenberg that "... we see that we apparently have little freedom in the selection of our problems. We are bound up with the historical process, our lives are parts of this process, and our choice seems to be restricted to the decision whether or not we want to participate in a development that takes place in our time, with or without our contribution... one may say that a fruitful period is characterized by the fact that the problems are given, that we need not invent them." To conclude then and to restore his name: Franq:ois Jacob emerges as a man of transparent candour and honesty in self-analysis and sensitive self-portraiture. It surely requires considerable courage to embark on such a task and then to present the results to others publicly. Others too with other backgrounds could and have done it; the value here resides in the fact that it comes from an oustanding scientist, one of the architects of modern biology. Centre for Theoretical Studies Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 560 012 India

N. M U K U N D A