Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  For Camus, even Sisyphus—condemned as he was to rolling his rock uphill each day, only to have it roll back down and to begin again—was master of his own fate. Sisyphus created meaning in his own life by deciding that “the struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Camus concluded the essay, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

  His reasoned optimism, born as it was in the middle of the Occupation and war, struck a chord with readers recovering from the tragedies of World War II. Camus once wrote, “In the depths of winter, I discovered that there lay within me an invincible summer.” Readers in France, and then as his works were translated, millions more readers around the world, responded to that invincible summer. Camus offered a practical philosophy for living without succumbing to nihilism or appealing to religion. In the aftermath of the great calamity, Camus offered the masses a picture of a brighter future for France and the world, an alternative to the cycle of war that had darkened a half century, and that threatened to continue. He offered a choice, as he put it, “between hell and reason.”

  His influence was widespread and profound. One Combat comrade stated, “Camus taught me reasons for living.” François Jacob later described his pursuit of scientific research in the most Camusian terms, as “the most elevating form of revolt against the incoherence of the universe.” The author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a close friend for many years, described Camus as “an admirable conjunction of a person, an action, and a work.”

  AS CAMUS EXPOUNDED the philosophical reasons for living, Monod and Lwoff were exploring the biological secrets of life. They were joined by Jacob in 1950.

  In the early 1940s, the mysteries of life were vast. Little was known, for instance, of how cells operated. At the time, physics and chemistry were the dominant sciences. While it was certain that organisms were composed of molecules, the identity of the molecules that endowed cells with the properties of life were completely unknown.

  In 1944, the famous physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger wrote a very influential, short book entitled What Is Life? that examined life from a physicist’s perspective. At the time of his writing, the concept of the gene was well established, but no one knew what genes were made of. Schrödinger’s account of the mysteries of the matter underlying living organisms inspired many young scientists to enter biology, not the least of whom were James D. Watson and Francis Crick, who solved the structure of DNA a decade later.

  It was a time for simple but fundamental questions. Monod pursued the mystery of how cells grow. He rediscovered a phenomenon in which bacteria, when given two sugars as sources of energy, used one first and then the second. Monod was asking a simple question: How did the bacteria “know” which sugar to use?

  Lwoff was interested in viruses that lay dormant within bacteria. He discovered that under certain conditions these latent viruses could, in effect, come back to life. When Jacob joined the research group, they asked another question: How did the virus “know” when to become active?

  The pursuit of these two apparently unrelated simple questions began in cramped and spartan laboratories in the attic of the Pasteur Institute, and led to one of the most creative, original, and influential bodies of work in modern biology. Monod and Jacob, in particular, discovered several of the major secrets of life (after DNA). Foremost among them were the first understanding of how genes are switched on and off as cells grow, and the discovery of messenger RNA, the molecule that serves as the intermediate (hence “messenger”) between genes in DNA and the proteins they encode. Monod and Jacob’s insights were far ahead of their time. Biologists barely had a foggy picture of what a gene was when Monod and Jacob delivered an exquisite synthesis of the general logic governing how genes were used. Walter Gilbert, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, described the two Frenchmen as having “made things that were utterly dark, very simple.”

  Their discoveries were certainly deserving of the Nobel Prize, but Monod and Jacob also displayed an extraordinary creative style that was often described in such literary terms as “taste” and “elegance.” Their exceptional eloquence was coupled with bold extrapolation. The two scientists anticipated and explained the broader implications of their work for understanding one of the greatest mysteries of biology—the development of a complex creature from a single fertilized egg. It would take several decades for biologists to penetrate that mystery in depth, but Monod and Jacob provided the conceptual foundations of that effort. And their scientific impact reverberated beyond academia, for their discoveries about the inner workings of bacteria and viruses provided key tools for the birth and growth of recombinant DNA technology and genetic engineering.

  REBELS

  Such achievements would be admirable legacies for any scientist, but these men’s concerns and talents reached far beyond the laboratory. For the former resistant Monod, the battle against totalitarian regimes was not over when the war against Nazism was won. Monod’s next major clash brought him into the orbit of and friendship with Albert Camus.

  Soon after the end of World War II, a new war emerged—of ideologies. It was a war between capitalism and socialism, between democracy and Communism, and the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In France, those along the entire spectrum of political ideologies from the far left to the far right vied for power and influence. The Communist Party enjoyed strong support, particularly among the intelligentsia and workers, many of whom looked to the Soviet Union as a model of where socialism in France should be heading.

  During the war, Monod had joined the Communist Party as a matter of expediency, so that he could join the FTP. But he developed reservations about the Communists’ intolerance of other political views and quietly quit the Party after the war, at a time when many fellow citizens were joining. That might have been the end of Monod’s involvement with Communism, were it not for bizarre developments in the sphere of Soviet science.

  In the summer of 1948, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s anointed czar of Soviet agriculture, launched a broad attack on the science of genetics. Lysenko believed that virtually any modification could be made rapidly and permanently to any plant or animal and passed on to its offspring. His belief, while consistent with Soviet doctrine that nature and man could be shaped in any way and were unconstrained by history or heredity, flew in the face of the principles of genetics that had been established over the previous fifty years. Nevertheless, Lysenko demanded that classical genetics, and its supporters, be purged from Soviet biology.

  Lysenko’s outrageous statements were heralded in Communist-run newspapers in France. Monod responded with a devastating critique that ran on the front page of Combat. Monod exposed Lysenko’s stance on genetics as antiscientific dogma and decried Lysenko’s power as a demonstration of “ideological terrorism” in the Soviet Union.

  The public scrutiny damaged the credibility of Soviet socialism in France. The episode thrust Monod into the public eye and made him resolve to “make his life’s goal a crusade against antiscientific, religious metaphysics, whether it be from Church or State.”

  AT THE TIME of Monod’s editorial in Combat, Albert Camus was having similar thoughts about the evils of the Soviet regime with its show trials and labor camps, thoughts that would eventually be articulated in his book-length essay The Rebel (1951).

  Monod and Camus were introduced at the meeting of a human-rights group and hit it off immediately. Their attraction to each other was deep. Although the two men had nothing in common in terms of their upbringing or professions, they were kindred spirits. Francis Crick described Monod in terms that applied equally well to his new friend Camus: “Never lacking in courage, he combined a debonair manner and an impish sense of humour with a deep moral commitment to any issue he regarded as fundamental.” In addition to the special bond of former resistants, Monod and Camus discovered they shared many similar concerns. Over the course of their friendship, those concerns would encompas
s a broad spectrum of humanitarian issues, including the state of affairs in the USSR, human rights in Eastern bloc countries, and capital punishment in France.

  Monod gave Camus further ammunition for his indictment of the Soviet Union, an indictment that terminated many of Camus’s friendships with left-wing peers. Camus gave Monod access to his world of literature and philosophy.

  Monod, too, was a conjunction of work and action. While Camus wrote “The Blood of the Hungarians” (1957) to arouse the world’s conscience about the Soviets’ crushing of the Hungarian revolution, Monod used his clandestine experience from the days of the Resistance to organize the escape of Hungarian scientists. As Monod’s fame grew from his scientific achievements, he used his standing to advance many causes, including reproductive and human rights, and he was a prominent figure in the May 1968 unrest that nearly toppled the French government.

  Camus had a profound influence on Monod and the philosophical ideas the biologist pursued in later years. After receiving his Nobel Prize, Monod turned to consider the implications of the discoveries of modern biology—how the answers to Schrödinger’s question “What is life?” bore on the question of the meaning of life. He explained his impulse in Camusian terms: “The urge, the anguish to understand the meaning of his own existence, the demand to rationalize and justify it within some consistent framework has been, and still is, one of the most powerful motivations of the human mind.” The opening epigraph of Monod’s resulting, widely acclaimed, bestselling book, Chance and Necessity, was the closing passage from his friend’s The Myth of Sisyphus.

  THIS BOOK TELLS the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into an extraordinarily creative and engaged individual. It is divided accordingly—the first half is the story of how the world shaped these men, and the second half is about how they shaped the world. The dividing line is the liberation of Paris, for the preceding war and occupation were the crucible in which their characters were tested, and from which they subsequently rose to such brilliance.

  Their close associates also possessed great courage and risked their lives for freedom. Two such heroines, Geneviève Noufflard and Agnes Ullmann, have allowed their extraordinary stories to be told here largely for the first time. Indeed, this book was made possible by the discovery of and access to a great deal of previously unknown and unpublished material: letters and other exchanges between Monod and Camus, as well as eyewitness accounts of their decade-long friendship; Paris police files on Monod’s initial activity in the Resistance; an unpublished wartime memoir by Noufflard, Monod’s secretary in the Resistance, and original documents concerning their participation in historic events; a trove of private letters by Monod and his wife, Odette, and other family members; and a large cache of documents detailing Monod’s efforts in arranging Ullmann’s daring escape from Hungary.

  What emerged from the many threads of Monod’s and Camus’s respective journeys was one story in common, the elements of which define four major episodes in their lives and form the four main sections of this book. These elements are the sudden and shocking fall of France (Part I—“The Fall”); the actions they took to fight back against the Nazis (Part II—“The Long Road to Freedom”); their initial explorations of the questions that would dominate their creative work (Part III—“Secrets of Life”); and the peak of their creative achievements and widening involvement in human affairs (Part IV—“Nobel Thoughts and Noble Deeds”).

  The Epilogue (“French Lessons”) examines how, after Camus’s death, Monod assumed part of his friend’s mantle through his public commitments and writing. Both men were deeply engaged with timeless questions about finding meaningful experiences in life. They were forced to ask, by virtue of the experiences into which they were plunged, the most fundamental questions of all: What is worth dying for? And what is worth living for? Once free, they were compelled to ask: What is worth spending one’s life pursuing? World War II, the Occupation, the Cold War, and the Hungarian Revolution belong to the past, but nothing has changed about the fundamental human yearning for meaning, and nothing has changed that alters the validity of their approaches. Monod argued that science had shattered traditional concepts of our purpose and place in the world. That being so, the choice remains of how to find meaning in a scientifically enlightened world.

  Part One

  The Fall

  ALL GREAT DEEDS AND ALL GREAT

  THOUGHTS HAVE A RIDICULOUS BEGINNING.

  —ALBERT CAMUS,

  THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

  The Arc de Triomphe in the blackout, Paris 1940. (Photo by Brassai, Lilliput magazine, June 1940)

  CHAPTER 1

  CITY OF LIGHT

  An artist … has no home in Europe except in Paris.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

  PARIS SLIPPED VERY QUIETLY INTO THE NEW YEAR OF 1940.

  It was not the fresh blanket of snow, though one of the heaviest in fifty years, that muted the typically boisterous celebration of Le Réveillon de la Saint-Sylvestre. Nor was it the unusually cold spell that plunged Paris and much of France to well below freezing temperatures that night.

  La Ville-Lumière (the City of Light) was dark and anxious. It had been so for four months.

  On September 3, 1939, two days after Germany’s invasion of Poland, France and her ally Great Britain had declared war. Blackouts were imposed across Paris to obscure potential targets from aerial bombing. The lights of the monuments and museums—the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe—were extinguished, the street lights along the grand boulevards and squares were veiled with a blue paint, as were automobile headlights, bicycle lights, and even handheld flashlights. Their blue beams cast an eerie, dim hue over the snow-covered city.

  The cafés, clubs, cabarets, and restaurants were open on New Year’s Eve, but their outside lights were off. Their windows and doors were covered to block the light from inside. The authorities extended closing time on this special occasion by three hours past the new wartime curfew, to two o’clock in the morning.

  For more than two centuries, since the time of Les Lumières (the Enlightenment), when Voltaire and Diderot rethought civilization over coffee at Le Procope in the Latin Quarter, those cafés had drawn philosophers and revolutionaries from all over the world, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. For the previous two decades, since the last war with Germany, the cafés and clubs of Paris had beckoned a remarkable generation of writers, artists, and musicians who made the city the artistic and intellectual center of Europe, if not the world.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Paris literary scene drew the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett. Ernest Hemingway often installed himself at his favorite café, La Closerie des Lilas, in its garden of lilac trees, with notebooks, pencils, and pencil sharpener at hand. He composed some of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, sitting at its marble-topped tables.

  Every form of art flourished in the Montparnasse area. Salvador Dalí came to Paris from Spain and was the principal figure of the surrealists, while Russian-born Marc Chagall was a pioneer of modernism. Spanish cubist Pablo Picasso lived and worked at various times in Montmartre and Montparnasse and then settled on the rue de la Boétie, not far from the Champs-Élysées. The prolific painter was represented by Paul Rosenberg, whose well-known gallery was next door to Picasso’s studio. Rosenberg would help make Picasso famous, selling his works alongside those by Monet, Degas, Matisse, van Gogh, Renoir, and Cézanne.

  The music scene also thrived. Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Carter came from the United States. In 1934, Belgian-born Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and three others formed the sensational Quintette du Hot Club de France, the most original and influential European jazz group of the era. Native legends Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier were immensely popular.

  Paris’s creativ
e life was not exclusively the domain of artists. Science prospered as well. In 1939, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a leading researcher on the splitting of the uranium atom, had his laboratory at the Collège de France in the Latin Quarter. Joliot-Curie, who shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his wife, Irène (daughter of Nobel laureates Pierre and Marie Curie), recognized the possibility of producing a chain reaction that would liberate massive amounts of energy. Joliot-Curie was one of the key scientists Albert Einstein cited in an August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the discoveries in physics that could possibly lead to the making of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”

  Fewer than two miles from the Collège de France was the crown jewel of French biology and one of the premier research institutions in the world—the Pasteur Institute. The institute was extending the many frontiers opened or advanced by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895). The primary catalyst to its formation was Pasteur’s pioneering efforts in developing vaccines. It was founded specifically to treat rabies. On July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Pasteur’s laboratory by his desperate mother. A rabid dog had bitten Joseph fourteen times. The severe bites would surely be fatal, so Pasteur decided to try to treat Joseph with an experimental rabies vaccine that, up to that point, had only been tested on dogs. After thirteen injections over the course of eleven days, miraculously the boy survived.

  After news of Meister’s case spread, several children from Newark, New Jersey, were sent to Pasteur and also treated successfully with the new vaccine. The resulting acclaim led to an international fund-raising effort to establish an institute, initially under Pasteur’s direction, that enabled thousands to be treated. Pasteur recruited other scientists with a similar, almost monastic, devotion to science. They would come to refer to themselves as “Pastorians.” This tribe of Pasteur’s associates and protégés led the world in understanding, preventing, and treating infectious diseases such as diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever, bubonic plague, typhus, and tuberculosis, and garnered four Nobel Prizes in Medicine or Physiology in just the first few decades after the initiation of the Prize. Those whose lives were touched, or saved, by Pasteur felt deep gratitude. Almost fifty-five years after being the first person treated, sixty-three-year-old Joseph Meister was working as a caretaker of the Institute.