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The Statue Within: an autobiography
by Francois Jacob; translated by Franklin Philip
Basic Books; New York, 1988; 326 pages; $22.95

Reviewed by
Joshua Lederberg
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Francois Jacob is the most illustrious of French
scientists living today.  His autobiography, La Statue
Interieure, has drawn wide attention in France, and in its lucid
English translation, The Statue Within should have an equally
broad appeal in this country.  As a work of literature, it
evokes unmistakable overtones of Rousseau, Proust and Sartre --
it is hard to imagine French autobiography that would ignore
those traditions -- but with a sure touch and lyric satisfaction
to the reader.

Scientists will have a particular interest in a remarkably
intimate confession of the personal development of an
outstanding leader in the history of modern molecular biology.
Those not within that particular discipline will gain a good
sense of the chase for the seminal concepts of gene regulation,
for the concept of the messenger RNA, which have guided the
further development of the subject for the past three decades.

Jacob was born in Nancy in 1920, the only child of a thoroughly
assimilated French Jewish family; his grandfather was the first
Jew to achieve the rank of four-star general in the French
Army.  His education in a Paris boys' school was unmitigated
blight, intellectually and emotionally: it evoked no evidence
of particular talent or commitment.  It left him with little more
than humiliation and bitterness that he was still taunted as a
Jew, not truly French - an echo of the anti-semitism that was to
bring world catastrophe from its upwelling in Germany.  For lack
of any better alternative he begins medical studies.  He was
deeply attached to his mother and June 1940, his 20th birthday,
was to bring him the double tragedy of losing her to cancer and
the fall of Paris to the Nazi army.  In that mood, the book
opens (in a flash-forward) with a preoccupation with death, with the contemplated
suicide of a mutilated comrade-in-arms, with a consolatory
reflection that the power of \fIsui\fRcide is still an ultimate means
of asserting the self, of cheating fate.

Jacob decides to flee France, to join De Gaulle's Free French Army in
London.  From that point, he begins to take charge of his own life.
That is, he lives with a passion, contributing to the War against
Hitler by doctoring in Africa, then fighting in Normandy.  Not without
courageous and tragic incident: striving to shield a fellow soldier,
his leg is shattered by shrapnel -- his friends know this has left him
at the margin of endurance to this day.  He is cheated of a triumphal
march, returning to Paris in an ambulance, and beginning a prolonged
and painful recovery.  He has also to endure the ambiguities of the
"\(aaepuration", the rejoining of a civic polity from a population that had
embraced heroes and cowards, victims, profiteers, collaborators, and
indifferent.  His wartime injuries and the hiatus in his studies hinder
his return to medicine.  By sheer inadvertence, he is moved to think of
biological research; and his (and science's) greatest fortune is his
encounter with Andre Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute.  Between 1950 and
1960, he develops from a 30-year old ignoramus (by his own account) to
one of the most creative investigators of his time.  With Jacques Monod
and Elie Wollman, he straightens out the confusing tale of the
mechanism of sexual conjugation in Escherichia coli, and uses this
system to demonstrate the repressor control of gene expression, both
for enzyme synthesis and for provirus maturation.  Before the decade is
over, he (with Sydney Brenner and Matthew Meselson) has demonstrated
the messenger RNA as an intermediate in gene expression.  At this
point, the book is concluded -- on a note of anticipation about the
next experiment.  But we know that in 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize
with Monod and Lwoff.

Having entered the mainstream of research in 1950, he has many
snapshots of his encounters with innumerable contemporaries.  It
would be too much to expect (and who knows how welcome it would
be?) were he to be as unguarded about his feelings in that world
as he is about his adolescence.  What he
.ig
He isn't so well imprinted now about material he has already
published in scientific journals.
..
does have to say will bring color to the image of many
personalities known widely as names in the history of
contemporary biology.  He also has much to offer about the
peculiarities of the French academic system in discouraging the
utmost creativity in biological research, a mantle that has
fallen to the Pasteur Institute, and the growing pattern of
research institutes outside the universities.

I found this an utterly fascinating work, and I am sure this
goes beyond my own working in the same vineyard for many years.
.ig
He is scrupulously fair in but appropriately proud of his
attributions of experimental priority; these inevitably have a
Rashomon quality, and others will have had similar inspirations,
independently.
..
.fi
It will set a new standard for candor and clarity in
self-revelatory exposition in scientific autobiography.  Not
every scientist will have the richness of expressive power, or
the complexity of personal development, to match that standard.
We should not be deterred from writing scientific memoirs, that
may add to the historiography of scientific discovery, but not
be surprised if these have a much more limited appeal.

My main problem with The Statue Within is bound up with the
title.  The concept, which I read as close to "ego-ideal", is
discussed at the very moment he has found his life vocation,
never mentioned again.  Are we to infer that the role of
Scientist was that statue,  Lwoff playing Michelangelo in
liberating it from the superfluous outer marble?  Or is he
telling us that the statue (a word which, even more in French,
implies perdurance) is intrinsically ever-changing?

Jacob has had many illustrious careers.  This, his most
imaginative work, was foreshadowed by other writings (The Logic
of Life; The Possible and the Actual).  It would be small
surprise if he has still another career before him, in
literature; and who knows, after that, in sculpture.  Nothing
seems beyond his taste and his skill.
.ig
NOT young Jacob.  The voice is "old Jacob".  That's why my ms.
said "flash-forward".  The comrade has suffered many years.
Perhaps:

"in his opening retroflections, Jacob ...."

The book has a complex structure.
..