# Des Hommes Engagés

Jon Beckwith*

Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

In the 1950s, my wife-to-be, Barbara, and I, like many other college students, read and were excited by the works of the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Over the years, we read as many books as we could by and about these two existentialists, their lives and their eventually acrimonious intellectual battles [1]. Early on, we came to consider ourselves existentialists. Just last year we re-read Camus' *The Plague* [2] in French to each other and, on a trip to Aix-en-Provence, went to an exhibit featuring passages of Camus' work that exemplified his striking, consistent, almost painterly use of words to describe colors. Camus, who was engaged with the world around him essentially for his whole life was often described as an *homme engagé* (committed man), a term the French use to describe such intellectuals.

In graduate school, I developed another French-connected passion. The scientific research of *Institut Pasteur* biologists François Jacob, Jacques Monod, Élie Wollman, and their colleagues inspired me to seek a position in their group. I applied and was invited to do postdoctoral work in Jacob's lab for the year 1964–1965. There, in addition to the science with Jacob, I got glimpses, through conversations with members of the lab, of Jacob and Monod's lives outside science. I learned that during World War II Jacob joined de Gaulle's Free French Army and had been badly wounded after the Normandy invasion and that Monod spent his days as a researcher at the *Institut Pasteur* and his nights helping the *Résistance* (the French Resistance movement) fight the German occupiers.

Our year in Paris made us ardent Francophiles; we returned to France again and again. We were curious about the Resistance—about how people make choices that lead them to risk their lives for a cause. We visited at least a dozen museums of the Resistance that recounted the stories and often-tragic fate of its members. We talked with Resistance fighters, including the father of one of Monod's students.

Two months after returning from our recent trip to France, I received a request

to review the book *Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize* written by evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll. The book, catalyzed by Carroll's discovery of a close connection between Monod and Camus, chronicles their lives, as well as Jacob's, from before World War II through much of the post-war period up until Monod's death in 1976. Carroll has, in effect, done the historian's work, ferreting out library, newspaper, *Institut Pasteur* archives, obtaining private letters, and interviewing those still alive who were connected to Jacob and Monod.

It is difficult for me to be objective about *Brave Genius*. It brings together several of my passions, including my fascination with French history and the Resistance. One always learns more with each new book that recounts individual stories of the Resistance, and *Brave Genius* is no different. But *Brave Genius* adds a surprising, provocative finding: the little-known and productive friendship between Camus and Monod. This liaison, since it adds a rare example of a breaching of the “two cultures” [3] barrier, should be of interest to scientists and anyone else who thinks about the interactions between science and society.

It is not surprising that Sean Carroll would write this book about engaged scientists, as he himself publishes occasional columns in the *New York Times* about scientific developments, has entered into battles over the teaching of evolution in schools, and currently heads the Howard Hughes Medical Institute science education program.

The first half of *Brave Genius* chronicles the lives of Monod, Camus, and François Jacob from the beginnings of World War

II to the liberation of Paris. Carroll covers Monod's scientific work during this period, along with the writings and developing philosophy of Camus. (Although both Monod and Camus were involved in the Resistance, the two met only after the liberation of France.) During the period of German occupation, Camus wrote some of his most important works, including *The Plague* in which he portrays a city's response to an outbreak of bubonic plague—symbolic of the Nazi occupation

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Carroll SB (2013) *Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize*. New York: Crown. 576 pp. ISBN 978-0-307-95233-2 (hardcover). US$28.00.</figcaption></figure>

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001722.g001

**Citation:** Beckwith J (2013) Des Hommes Engagés. PLoS Biol 11(12): e1001722. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001722

Published December 3, 2013

**Copyright:** © 2013 Jon Beckwith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

**Funding:** The author received no specific funding for this work.

**Competing Interests:** The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

* E-mail: jbeckwith@hms.harvard.edu
and the spread of fascism as well as
exploring deeper questions about the
human condition. He joined a Resistance
group in southern France and then moved
to Paris where he became Editor of the
important underground Resistance news-
paper *Combat*.

Camus' activities during the war are
fairly well known. But, little was known
publicly about Monod's exploits in the
Resistance, which are dramatic enough to
have provided the plot-line for one of the
many movies and books on the subject. In
1938, Monod, although initially uncertain
about continuing in science, began his
research career at the Sorbonne, moving
to the *Institut Pasteur* five years later. He
served in the French army that was
confronting the German invasion in 1940
and returned to Paris to join the Resis-
tance when Marshall Pétain surrendered
to the Germans. He connected with the
network of ethnologists and anthropolо-
gists at the *Musée de l'Homme* (Museum of
Man) who comprised one of the first
Resistance groups in France. Monod faced
great danger as he distributed the group's
newspaper at night. Members of the
network, including close friends, were
killed or deported; Monod himself had
several close escapes.

With the *Musée de l'Homme* group crushed, Monod joined the communist-led *Franc-Tireurs* (Free Shooters) group where he recruited and trained new members. On one mission, he trekked through the snowy Alps to avoid arrest so that he might reach Geneva, where he was to request money for arms from the United States Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the present Central Intelligence Agency. After the allied landings at Normandy in 1944, Monod was chosen to prepare battle plans for the *Franc-Tireurs* that would facilitate the success of the allied forces as they approached Paris. He recruited chemist Frédéric Joliot-Curie to provide a recipe for Molotov cocktails.

Remarkably, while Monod had both
daytime (research) and nighttime (Resis-
tance) jobs, he also led a Bach chorale
group for some time. Despite these
"distractions" from science during the
war, he and his student Alice Audereau
made two important discoveries concern-
ing the ability of bacteria to utilize the
sugar lactose as their carbon source.

Carroll tells us not only of Monod's
exploits in the Resistance, more extensive
than I imagined, but also how he contin-
ued his engagement with the post-war
world until his death in 1976. In 1948,
Monod attracted wide attention with his

About the Author

Jon Beckwith is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. His research career has focused mainly on the use of bacterial genetics to study fundamental biological processes. He has published over 300 papers in this field and, among other awards, has received the 2005 Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Microbiology. He has also been active in issues at the interface of science and society, he teaches a course entitled 'Social Issues in Biology' every year and has published over 100 articles on these subjects. He has also published a memoir *Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science* (Harvard University Press, 2002). For his work in this latter area, he received the 2009 Edinburgh Medal for "professional achievements that have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity."

stinging critique of Lysenkoism, published
in *Combat*, which Camus had left the
previous year. Trofim Lysenko controlled
genetics and agriculture in the Soviet
Union from about 1930 to 1964, convinc-
ing Stalin of his theories of the heritability
of acquired characteristics. Lysenko's pow-
er led to the death or exile of a number of
geneticists and, some say, to the demise of
Soviet agriculture. Monod's critique of the
Soviet Union and Lysenko's ideological
influence on science policy was a useful
example to Camus as he was beginning to
find himself in the midst of an increasingly
bitter public feud with Sartre over Camus'
anti-Soviet positions. In this same year,
Monod attended meetings of a group co-
founded by Camus that was anti-totalitar-
ian, anti-Stalinist, critical of "American
worship of technology," and closely con-
nected to the periodical *Révolution Prolé-
tairienne*.

After that meeting, Monod and Camus
found that they shared many of the same
perspectives and they became friends.
Carroll argues reasonably that Camus'
discussions of scientific matters in his 1951
book *The Rebel* [4] reflected Monod's
critique of Lysenkoism and his knowledge
of contemporary genetics and evolutionary
theory, although there are no citations to
support that conclusion. Camus, in a 1957
letter to Monod, said, "we are united in
the same adventure." Monod, whose 1971
book *Chance and Necessity* [5] contains
passages that read like existentialist litera-
ture, stated subsequently "Camus' existen-
tialism in the widest sense is what I share."
(Camus, who received the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1957, died in a car accident
in 1960.) It is clear from their correspon-
dence and the comments of friends of both
that Monod and Camus were dear to each
other, yet there are no memoirs from
either of them that might have given us a
fuller picture of this remarkable relation-
ship. (They both died relatively young.)
Nevertheless, they were close enough for
Camus, in 1949, to ask Monod if he could
arrange for medical care for the father of

one of his many mistresses, the famous
actress Maria Casarès.

After the war, Monod continued to be
politically engaged, becoming involved in
numerous struggles against injustice. He
protested the US government's rejection of
visa requests for himself and other Euro-
peans who had been former Communists.
His protest letter, published in 1952 in
*Science* magazine, caused an international
stir. After the Russians crushed the
Hungarian uprising in 1956, Monod
became the organizer of an ultimately
successful effort to smuggle a couple, both
scientists, out of Hungary. The extraor-
dinary strategies Monod devised to extri-
cate the two may have benefited from his
experience in the Resistance. One of the
two scientists, Agnes Ullmann, became his
long-time close collaborator. In 1965,
Monod, André Lwoff, and Jacob, shortly
after receiving word of their Nobel Prizes,
publicly called on the French government
to support the use of contraception. In
1966, when Martin Luther King visited
France to give a fund-raising speech
before 5,000 people at Paris' *Palais des
Sports*, Monod was asked to introduce
him. In 1968, when French students
manned the barricades to protest the
educational system—protests that led to
unrest in much of France—both Monod
and Jacob supported the students, sup-
plying them with food and medical
supplies. A newspaper photo of Monod
shows him helping students wounded by
the police.

François Jacob's war experiences also
had their dramatic moments as described
in Carroll's book, but his own memoir has
already described these in great detail [6].
From 1950, at the *Institut Pasteur*, Jacob
participated with Monod in some of his
more political activities, and also wrote a
number of articles for French and US
newspapers criticizing eugenics, Nobel
Prize laureate sperm banks, and racist
theories [7].

In addition to the Camus–Monod
friendship and their influence on each
other, a growing scientific collaboration
between Jacob and Monod flowered in the
late 1950s: a collaboration described by
Jacob as something like a love affair. In a
dizzying few years they and their col-
leagues, most notably Arthur Pardee,
discovered how genes are expressed and
how gene expression can be regulated by a
repressor (the *lac* repressor binding to the
*lac* operon in bacteria). Their findings were
among the handful that initiated the
biological revolution we are living through
today. It was for this work, and the work
that led up to it, that Jacob, Lwoff, and
Monod were awarded their Nobel Prizes
in 1965. Carroll describes the experiments
and their implications in language acces-

sible to non-scientists. Similarly, he pro-
vides a very clear explanation of Camus'
existentialism, which is so central to this
story.

Both Monod and Jacob, to my mind,
deserve the sobriquet “l'homme engagé.”
The stories of their commitment to
activism are important for young scientists
to know of, since the period of war and
post-war activism of scientists is over. As
the historian of science Jennet Conant
said when lamenting the death of anti-
nuclear activist and science educator
physicist Philip Morison, scientists cur-
rently “have become a quiet, docile lot.”
[8]. It is encouraging that there is
someone like Sean B. Carroll to make us

aware of these “*scientifiques* (scientists)
*engagés*.”

I have always felt that the best books
about science or scientists are those that
embed their stories in the history of the
times. They can make the history itself
seem more tangible and explain much
about the scientists in that history. Two
recent books of this sort are Kai Bird and
Martin Sherwin's *American Prometheus: The
Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenhei-
mer* and Rebecca Skloot's *The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks*. Sean B. Carroll's
book *Brave Genius* provides the same kind
of enlightenment as these other rich
stories.

References

1. Aronson R (2004) Camus and Sartre: The story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 291 p.

2. Camus P (1991) The plague. New York: Vintage 320 p.

3. Snow CP (1959) The two cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 107 p.

4. Camus A (1992) The rebel: an essay on Man in revolt. New York: Vintage 320 p.

5. Monod J (1971) Chance and necessity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 198 p.

6. Jacob F (1988) The statue within: an autobiogra-
phy. New York: Basic Books. 326 p.

7. Beckwith J, Yaniv M (2013) Francois Jacob (1920–2013). Curr Biol 23: R423–R425.

8. Conant J (2005 April 28) Last of the outs-
poken scientists. The Boston Globe, p. A15
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0428-
20.htm