The Statue Within: An Autobiography

"I think it stands out in terms of scientists telling their own stories. There’s a level of candour in the book that is often surprising: regarding his feelings about various things, whether that’s his hatred of Hitler, or falling in love, or even his first adventures in science. He’s candid about what he knew and what he didn’t, which was mostly what he didn’t know. It’s written in an unusual style. It’s not strictly chronological. It has a literary quality to it because it’s not structured in a predictable way. He has some amazing experiences both in life and in science. Not many of us live a life as rich as François Jacob. So it’s a great journey and it’s told in a very interesting way. It’s a book I’ve returned to several times because I think you can appreciate it at different stages of life. You can read it when you’re 25, and then, if you’ve got a little more mileage on you, you appreciate it even more. There are other famous science autobiographies like The Double Helix by Jim Watson, but Jacob’s was different. Jacob was more revealing of himself. I find that really special. He was a medical student at the outbreak of World War II when France was invaded and he raced for the coast. France was collapsing around him, but he wanted to continue to fight. So he was one of the relatively small number that were able to get on a boat and get to England, and he joined up with Charles de Gaulle, who had announced his intention to fight over the airwaves. Jacob wanted to be an artillery gunner, he really wanted to kill Germans. But because he had some medical training they made him a medic. He served for 4 years in the North Africa campaign. He was exposed to the cultures of those countries, and, at the same time, he was exposed to combat and treating the wounded and the dying. Then he returned to England in preparation for the invasion of Normandy. He came over a bit after the first landings, in August of ‘44. While trying to protect a patient, he was almost killed in a bombing attack and suffered severe shrapnel wounds. He went through many surgeries and a long convalescence, but it ended his medical career. He wanted to be a surgeon but his hand was too damaged. So he really struggled to find his place after the war. This was the era of antibiotics. He decided that he was going to make his way in scientific research even though he had very little training. He had to be very persistent, knock on a lot of doors, go through a lot of rejection, before he got a chance. In the 1950s he teamed up with another important person to me, Jacques Monod, to crack one of the most fundamental mysteries of regulation in life, which is how do genes turn on and off? It’s linked to the physiological observation that cells make what they need when they need it, and only when they need it. Again it’s that logic. In fact, Jacob used the phrase ‘the logic of life’, and wrote a book about it. It’s remarkably logical that cells make what they need when they need it and not when they don’t need it. You think, how does a cell know what to make? The first penetrating insights into that came from work by Jacob and Monod."