Nobel Prize Recipient. Jacques Monod, a French biologist, received international recognition after receiving the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared the coveted award with two colleagues from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Francois Jacob and André Michel Lwoff. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the three scientists received the award "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis." He is credited with discovering messenger RNA, a crucial factor in the functioning of the cell. Starting in 1958 he, along with Jacob and Arthur Pardee, performed numerous experiments, which were called the PaJaMo experiments, in the area in RNA. In 1961 he and Jacob mapped the intricate processes that determine how genes are expressed or suppressed in a self-regulating process. Born Jacques Lucien Monod to an American mother, his father was a Parisian portrait painter and an avid reader of Charles Darwin. When he was a child, the family relocated south to Cannes. After attending the Lycee's at Cannes until his was eighteen, he started his studies of biology at the Sorbonne in Paris in October of 1928, earning a Bachelor's degree in natural science in 1931. At that point, he obtained a fellowship to work with Edouard Chatton at the University of Strasbourg. Traveling to the United States in 1936 on a Rockefeller Scholarship, he spent a year at the Thomas Hunt Morgan Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, researching Drosophila genetics. Returning to Paris, he earned his Doctorate in Science in 1940 from the University of Paris. During World War II, he joined the French Resistance fighting Nazi Forces, which had invaded France. In preparation for the Allied landings, he arranged parachute drops of weapons, railroad bombings, and mail interceptions. He became chief of staff of the French Forces of the Interior, and he was highly decorated for his efforts with a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre in 1945 and the American Bronze Star Medal. After the war, he was appointed laboratory chief at the Pasteur Institute in 1945. Consecutively, he was appointed the head of the institute's department of cellular biochemistry in 1953, appointed full professor at the Faculte des Sciences in 1959, and director general of the Institute Pasteur in 1971. He published "Chance and Necessity," his 1971 book based on a series of lectures on the philosophical implications of modern biology, which were given at Pomona College in 1969. In 1973 he signed the Humanist Manifesto II, which was a statement against world war. He spoke fluent English and loved music and literature. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was a foreign member of the Royal Society of Britain, received the Louis Rapkine Medal in London in 1958, elected a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960, and awarded in 1963 the Legion d'Honneur, which is one of the highest distinctions possible for a Frenchman. Opening in 1966, the Institute Jacques Monod, which was funded jointly by the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Paris, is one of the main centers for basic research in biology in the Paris area for Ph.D. students, post-docs, technicians, engineers, and other scientific investigators. As a widower, he died from leukemia, leaving twin sons. A 1979 biography, "Origins of Molecular Biology: A Tribute to Jacques Monod," was edited by Agnes Ullmann and Nobel Prize recipient, André Lwoff.