François Jacob - Gunther Stent and working in pairs (54/77)
To listen to more of François Jacob, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBSb6rIJ0Sg&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxcUFA9rIQwdpd7L7ayJnKk 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: Gunther Stent was one of Delbrück's students, like most of those guys. And Elie Wollman had gone to the United States for two years at Delbrück's lab. And Elie and Gunther Stent became very good friends, they worked together on something completely uninteresting, which was the role of tryptophan in the absorption of T4 phage. Apparently, T4 phage doesn't get absorbed if there isn't any tryptophan. So they worked on that for two years. It didn't make much of an impact... and so Elie and Gunther were very good friends and Gunther often came over. And in fact, Gunther invited Elie to Berkeley for a year. And it's during the year that Elie spent in Berkeley that we really did things with Monod. And so when he came back, we told him, 'Come work with us'. And he said no. Things were already on their way. It wasn't worthy of him. [MM] And afterwards, Gunther Stent is sort of going to be opposed to the Operon? Yes, he did the Operon, but he didn't do it at the DNA level, but at the level of... but he was always against it. We can almost say that he was regularly opposed to every theory that came out and we can say that we could pretty much bet that the truth was more or less the opposite of what he was saying. Almost every time. So it was reassuring when he was opposed to... It wasn't 'that reliable' but almost. [MM] And in fact afterwards, in the years that follow, I know that in development biology, he's also going to be opposed to gene development. Yes, he always ventured off the beaten tracks. But he was very very nice. He talked quite a lot. He's a philosopher now, it suits him well, he had a philosophical mind. He's a philosophy lecturer. He gives philosophy lectures at Berkeley. [MM] And when you speak of that time, you often insisted on the pairs of scientists. It was a time, when people often worked in pairs. Yes, I think that until the war, they worked alone. Now you need 20 or 25 people to work on the genome. But at that time, at the birth of molecular biology, there were couples, there were pairs. There was Watson and Crick, there was Luria-Delbrück, there was Jacob-Monod, etc. There was Meselson and Stahl, exactly. It's funny, but that's how it was, there were pairs. But I believe that working alone is boring, it's much more fun to work with someone, it's more cheerful, it goes much quicker.
To listen to more of François Jacob, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBSb6rIJ0Sg&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxcUFA9rIQwdpd7L7ayJnKk 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: Gunther Stent was one of Delbrück's students, like most of those guys. And Elie Wollman had gone to the United States for two years at Delbrück's lab. And Elie and Gunther Stent became very good friends, they worked together on something completely uninteresting, which was the role of tryptophan in the absorption of T4 phage. Apparently, T4 phage doesn't get absorbed if there isn't any tryptophan. So they worked on that for two years. It didn't make much of an impact... and so Elie and Gunther were very good friends and Gunther often came over. And in fact, Gunther invited Elie to Berkeley for a year. And it's during the year that Elie spent in Berkeley that we really did things with Monod. And so when he came back, we told him, 'Come work with us'. And he said no. Things were already on their way. It wasn't worthy of him. [MM] And afterwards, Gunther Stent is sort of going to be opposed to the Operon? Yes, he did the Operon, but he didn't do it at the DNA level, but at the level of... but he was always against it. We can almost say that he was regularly opposed to every theory that came out and we can say that we could pretty much bet that the truth was more or less the opposite of what he was saying. Almost every time. So it was reassuring when he was opposed to... It wasn't 'that reliable' but almost. [MM] And in fact afterwards, in the years that follow, I know that in development biology, he's also going to be opposed to gene development. Yes, he always ventured off the beaten tracks. But he was very very nice. He talked quite a lot. He's a philosopher now, it suits him well, he had a philosophical mind. He's a philosophy lecturer. He gives philosophy lectures at Berkeley. [MM] And when you speak of that time, you often insisted on the pairs of scientists. It was a time, when people often worked in pairs. Yes, I think that until the war, they worked alone. Now you need 20 or 25 people to work on the genome. But at that time, at the birth of molecular biology, there were couples, there were pairs. There was Watson and Crick, there was Luria-Delbrück, there was Jacob-Monod, etc. There was Meselson and Stahl, exactly. It's funny, but that's how it was, there were pairs. But I believe that working alone is boring, it's much more fun to work with someone, it's more cheerful, it goes much quicker.