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François Jacob - Isolating the repressor (55/77)

87 views · Published 10 August 2017 · 0:58 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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François Jacob (1920-2013) was a French biochemist whose work focused on understanding how genes are controlled. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jacque Monod and André Lwoff for his contribution to the field of biochemistry. [Listener: Michel Morange; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT: [Q] In the end, it wasn't the Pasteurian laboratory who isolated the repressor?

No.

[MM] Did you regret it?

Yes, I didn't really appreciate it. I thought that the geneticists had worked much harder than the chemists. And that the chemists, whose job it was to isolate the repressor hadn't isolated it. Actually, the people that isolated the repressor used one or two tricks, such as obtaining mutants that did much more than the normal strain, the wild-type, because obviously, the quantity of repressor per cell is very small. And we could expect that it would be very small. So they had better isolate the mutants that were doing too much. And they found some, which simplified the isolation of the repressor.

[MM] But in the end, the isolation? Well, it wasn't us. It wasn't you, but it was a perfect confirmation.

Yes, it was even indispensable. But that's why it would have been good if it had been us.

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