Francois Jacob, 1920-2013

Andre Lwoff, Jacques Monod, and Francois Jacob win the Nobel Prize in 1965.
Courtesy of the James D. Watson Collection.

Last Friday famed molecular biologist Francois Jacob passed away.  Jacob, along with Andrew Lwoff and Jacques Monod, was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for identifying messenger RNA and their work on gene regulation.  This research was conducted during the golden age of molecular biology--the period from the late 1940s until the early 1960s when our understanding of genetics grew leaps and bounds.  Jacob described the tight-knit community of scientists at the time in an oral history interview for Web of Stories:

"There were 15 or 20 guys, always the same ones [at scientific meetings]. Roughly there were Delbrück's guys- there was the Delbrück-Luria group, Jim [Watson] who came from it because he was Luria's student. In England there was Crick and Sydney [Brenner]. And there was us here. And that's it."

The CSHL Library & Archives holds a number of letters between Jacob, Watson, Brenner, Crick, and others, which illustrate the community and friendship which existed among many of the major scientists of the era. 
 

Courtesy of the James D. Watson Collection.

The letter above is from Francois Jacob to Matthew Meselson.  The two, along with Sydney Brenner, conducted a famous experiment at Caltech which showed that RNA was a copy of the information in DNA.  The RNA acts as a messenger, transporting the information from the nucleus to the protein-making machinery in the cell.  As the letter indicates, Watson and Francois Gros were also working on RNA at the time.

For more letters and photographs related to Francois Jacob please visit our online repository.

"Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" Digitization Project

Postcard from Crick to Watson, from the James D. Watson Collection at CSHL
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library & Archives is pleased to announce a large-scale digitization project that will provide free, online access to the papers of Nobel Laureates Dr. James D. Watson and Dr. Sydney Brenner. This project is part of the Wellcome Library’s "Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" series, and will include the papers of Francis Crick (Wellcome Library), Rosalind Franklin (Churchill College), and Maurice Wilkins (King's College, London), as well as Guido Pontecorvo, James Harrison Renwick and Malcolm Ferguson-Smith (University of Glasgow).

 Dr. Watson’s collection documents his life, from his early days in Chicago, to the discovery of the double helix structure in Cambridge (for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1962), to his role as a leader locally at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, as well as internationally as head of the Human Genome Project in the 1980s. Dr. Brenner’s collection documents his work on the genetic code and establishing the nematode c. elegans as a model organism for animal development and neurology (for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2002). Thus the papers which document the story of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, as well as the early research on the genetic code, will be united online to be freely and easily accessible by scholars and educators alike.

BBC Radio 4 recently aired a segment on the digitization project on its Today program.  The segments includes interviews with Dr. Simon Chaplin, the head of the Wellcome Library, and Dr. John Sulston, who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with Sydney Brenner and  H. Robert Horvitz in 2002.  BBC medical correspondent Fergus Walsh, who contributed to the Today piece, also posted a story regarding the project in which he explores some of the material in the collections.