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The article presents the different experiences of several prominent French scientists and mathematicians in their applications for visas to the United States. The notable French nationals include Jacques Monod, Jean Leray, Lawrence Schwartz, Daniel Chalonge, and Jacques Hadamard. They narrate their difficulties in obtaining United States visas as a result of the provisions of the Internal Security Act of 1950 and their being men involved in science. Being a member of the communist party makes it also extremely difficult for individuals to enter the United States.

While the 'mechanosphere' is a concept mentioned only six times in A Thousand Plateaus, it is fundamental to the way Deleuze and Guattari construct their geophilosophy. In this article, I argue that the mechanosphere solves what Louis Althusser calls the idealist coupling of mechanism and spiritualism implicit in Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and in Jacques Monod's appropriation of the term. My contention is that the mechanosphere must be contextualised within Althusser's critique of Monod, delivered during the 'Philosophy Course for Scientists' at the École normale supérieure rue d'Ulm in 1967. Reading A Thousand Plateaus (1980) against Monod's Chance and Necessity (1970) and Althusser's Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists (1967), I argue that the mechanosphere evacuates the spectre of an 'idealist tendency' latent in Monod's molecular science. By refashioning Teilhard's Omega point, Deleuze and Guattari create a sphere that serves as an asymptote on the horizon of ecological history - a projected point of complete destratification between the production of human subjects and planetary ecology. Ultimately, the mechanosphere nuances contemporary treatments of the Anthropocene, asking us to consider not only how humanity is overwhelming natural forces, but also how the former category is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of allostery has evolved in the past century. In this Editorial, we briefly overview the history of allostery, from the pre-allostery nomenclature era starting with the Bohr effect (1904) to the birth of allostery by Monod and Jacob (1961). We describe the evolution of the allostery concept, from a conformational change in a two-state model (1965, 1966) to dynamic allostery in the ensemble model (1999); from multi-subunit (1965) proteins to all proteins (2004). We highlight the current available methods to study allostery and their applications in studies of conformational mechanisms, disease, and allosteric drug discovery. We outline the challenges and future directions that we foresee. Altogether, this Editorial narrates the history of this fundamental concept in the life sciences, its significance, methodologies to detect and predict it, and its application in a broad range of living systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphor of the "genetic program," indicating the genome as a set of instructions required to build a phenotype, has been very influential in biology despite various criticisms over the years. This metaphor, first published in 1961, is thought to have been invented independently in two different articles, one by Ernst Mayr and the other by François Jacob and Jacques Monod. Here, after a detailed analysis of what both parties meant by "genetic program," I show, using unpublished archives, the strong resemblance between the ideas of Mayr and Monod and suggest that their idea of genetic program probably shares a common origin. I explore the possibility that the two men met before 1961 and also exchanged their ideas through common friends and colleagues in the field of molecular biology. Based on unpublished correspondence of Jacob and Monod, I highlight the important events that influenced the preparation of their influential paper, which introduced the concept of the genetic program. Finally, I suggest that the genetic program metaphor may have preceded both papers and that it was probably used informally before 1961. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1959, Jacques Monod wrote a manuscript entitled Cybernétique enzymatique [Enzymatic cybernetics]. Never published, this unpublished manuscript presents a synthesis of how Monod interpreted enzymatic adaptation just before the publication of the famous papers of the 1960s on the operon. In addition, Monod offers an example of a philosophy of biology immersed in scientific investigation. Monod's philosophical thoughts are classified into two categories, methodological and ontological. On the methodological side, Monod explicitly hints at his preferences regarding the scientific method in general: hypothetical-deductive method, and use of theoretical models. He also makes heuristic proposals regarding molecular biology: the need to analyse the phenomena in question at the level of individual cells, and the dual aspect of all biological explanation, functional and evolutionary. Ontological issues deal with the notions of information and genetic determinism, “cellular memory”, the irrelevance of the notion of “living matter”, and the usefulness of a cybernetic comprehension of molecular biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monod gained stature as an experimentalist and theorist as well as a discipline builder. The essay reviews the intimate connection of the intellectual and institutional projects in his career. A brief comparison with the development of the new science of molecular biology across the English Channel highlights the commonalities and specificities of the disciplinary projects in France and Britain and the role that individuals like Monod played in their formation. The article argues that there was not a single path that led to the rise of molecular biology. Rather individual initiatives and historical contingencies very much shaped local outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacques Monod's ideas on the applications of science came within the scope of a long tradition at the Institut Pasteur. Louis Pasteur, whose scientific career was characterized by a permanent come and go between science and its applications, long opposed the idea of getting any income from his research, until the financial needs of the Institut Pasteur made him change his mind. As for Jacques Monod, he remained a fervent supporter of basic science during his whole scientific career. However, once he became director of the Institut Pasteur, he realized that the applications of research had to be developed to support the institute from a financial point of view. Thus, he reorganized the valorization of research in the institute, through an incitation of scientists to develop projects with possible applications, and by creating a company, Institut Pasteur Production, for which he had a factory built, and which was in charge of producing and commercializing the vaccines and reagents stemming from the research at the Institut Pasteur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacques Monod gave us not only our first regulatory system, but also our first smart molecules – i.e., he gave us allosteric proteins. But both of these contributions hung in a certain tension with his primary commitments. In particular, I focus here on the ways in which his ontological commitments constrained his thinking about the power of allostery. Although he wrote that “so far as regulation through allosteric interaction is concerned, e verything is possible ”, for him, not everything was conceivable. In particular, what was not conceivable was a challenge to the primacy of DNA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The founders of molecular biology shared views on the place of biology within science, as well as on the relations of molecular biology to Darwinism. Jacques Monod was no exception, but the study of his writings is particularly interesting because he expressed his point of view very clearly and pushed the implications of some of his choices further than most of his contemporaries. The spirit of molecular biology is no longer the same as in the 1960s but, interestingly, Monod anticipated some recent evolutions of this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review, I compare the development of Monod's intellectual leadership in two fields, the regulation of enzyme biosynthesis and the control of enzymatic activity. I characterize the comings and goings between his scrupulous analysis of a given model system, his ability to compare the outcome with very distant experimental results, his audacity in formulating, then a physical interpretation of this convergence through a unifying mechanism. Finally, I briefly discuss how his attitude has durably impacted the whole field of molecular biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his famous book Le hasard et la nécessité (1970), Monod claims that natural evolution is based on the interplay between chance and necessity bringing about adaptive evolutionary change. This article addresses a set of related questions about Monod's conception of chance: what does he mean when he uses the term “chance”? Does he invoke one or many different concepts of chance? What are the implications of his conception about the issue of the deterministic or indeterministic nature of the biological world? Is Monod's view of what chance is relevant in contemporary biology? This paper, structured by these four questions, aims at providing a synthetic study of the way Monod conceptualizes chance, particularly highlighting the metaphysical and epistemological implications of his conception and its value in biology today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of molecular biology placed in the foreground a mechanistic and deterministic conception of the functioning of macromolecules. In this article, I show that this conception was neither obvious, nor necessary. Taking Jacques Monod as a case study, I detail the way he gradually came loose from a statistical understanding of determinism to finally support a mechanistic understanding. The reasons of the choice made by Monod at the beginning of the 1950s can be understood only in the light of the general theoretical schema supported by the concept of mechanistic determinism. This schema articulates three fundamental notions for Monod, namely that of the rigidity of the sequence of the genetic program, that of the intrinsic stability of macromolecules (DNA and proteins), and that of the specificity of molecular interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of his scientific career, Jacques Monod appeared to be a man of a single problem: the formation of enzymes and the regulation of their properties. His ability to produce theoretical models led him to play a major role in both the discovery of the operon regulation and the model of allosteric transitions. The successes of Monod, from the 1950s to the Noble Prize (1965), are already well documented. In this paper, I will focus on the Monod before Monod, that is, the Monod who, during the 1940s, tried to explain the fundamental phenomenon of enzymatic adaptation. To begin with, however, I will survey how this phenomenon was discovered and explained by French Pasteurians at the very beginning of the twentieth century. This first explanation took place amidst an entrenched Lamarckian atmosphere in French thought, which was still alive during the 1920s and the 1930s, when Monod commenced the study of biology at the Sorbonne. Because of his will to construct a scientific biology free from teleology, Monod always tried to break from the legacy of this traditional background of Lamarckism, and he consequently developed ways of thinking that, in the main, were not part of the French biological tradition. Nevertheless, one point did link Monod to French history: his fruitful interactions with André Lwoff. As we shall see, these interactions were necessary for the development of Monod's science, both technically and intellectually speaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A manuscript on allostery signed by Francis Crick and Jeffries Wyman was sent by Crick to Jacques Monod in 1965. Monod transmitted a copy of the manuscript, upon which he had written several comments, to Jean-Pierre Changeux, then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley in the laboratory of Howard Schachman. Changeux provided a copy to Stuart Edelstein, a graduate student in the same laboratory. The manuscript was never submitted for publication, but Edelstein retained his copy since that time and has edited it for publication in the special issue on allostery. The text emphasized the interpretation of the properties of an allosteric oligomer by characterizing its equivalent monomer. The text also developed the concept of the allosteric range and included a simple equation for calculation of the Hill coefficient from the parameters of the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article reports on French scientists François Jacob and Jacques Monod as well as their views on Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's concept towards genetics and agriculture. It highlights the contribution of Monod and Jacob on the rise of molecular biology in the post-war era. It also explores their elaboration for understanding genetic regulation which involve the modulation of cell activity.

The article discusses the history of allostery since 1960, which is describe as the conformational protein changes after the binding of ligands. It states that allostery was discovered by H. Edwin Umbarger during the end-product inhibition of the enzymes in the metabolic pathways, which was introduced by Monod at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium in 1961. It adds that allostery along with catalysis provide modify protein and enzyme activity.

Carboxyltransferase is one component of the multifunctional enzyme acetyl-CoA carboxylase which catalyzes the first committed step in fatty acid biosynthesis. Carboxyltransferase is an α2β2 heterotetramer and possesses two distinct but integrated functions. One function catalyzes the transfer of carbon dioxide from biotin to acetyl-CoA, whereas the other involves binding to the mRNA encoding both subunits. When carboxyltransferase binds to the mRNA both enzymatic activity and translation of the mRNA are inhibited. However, the substrate acetyl-CoA competes with mRNA for binding. Thus, mRNA binding by carboxyltransferase provides an effective mechanism for regulating enzymatic activity and gene expression. This conceptual review takes the position that regulation of enzymatic activity and gene expression of carboxyltransferase by binding to its own mRNA is at its most fundamental level the result of the symmetry in the chemical reaction catalyzed by the enzyme. The chemical reaction is symmetrical in that both substrates generate enolate anions during the course of catalysis. The chemical symmetry led to a structural symmetry in the enzyme where both the α and β subunits contain oxyanion holes that stabilize the enolate anions. Then the region of the mRNA that codes for the oxyanion holes provided the binding sites for carboxyltransferase. Thus, the symmetry of the chemical reaction formed the foundation for the evolution of the mechanism for regulation of carboxyltransferase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'In Science, self satisfaction is death. Personal self satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self satisfaction is the death of research. It is the restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish Science'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study of life, looking at human exceptionalism and the inseparability of the identity of life and the identity of the Subject. The author examines the work of the sociologist Émile Durkheim on suicide, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's work on the individuation of the socius through observation in the essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," and the sociologist Roger Caillois on mineral authors in his book "The Writing of Stones." Other academics whose work is addressed include the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the biologist Jacques Monod, and the physicist Karen Barad.

Abstract: Even today, the concepts developed by Jacques Monod during the course of his career remain at the core of modern biology. Looking back, Jacques Monod stands out as one of the giants who most strongly marked twentieth century science. He was endowed with intelligence, rigor, creativity, a relentless sense of deductive reasoning and a love of scientific elegance. His name will remain intimately associated with the birth, development and triumph of molecular biology. He was not only a brilliant scientist, but along with that he was a generous laboratory director who gave selflessly to his many students and co-workers. Yet in our minds, he will also remain a man with a profound moral commitment to any cause which he felt just. He was a true humanist. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The operon model was the last “great” discovery of molecular biology, and a decisive event for the entrance of molecular biology into embryology. But the work of Monod was not limited to the elaboration of this model. He was one of the founders of molecular biology, in the paradigm of which biologists still work. I focus on two episodes of Monod''s career—his strong opposition to Lysenkoism and the elaboration of the allosteric model—to outline the ideas and convictions of the early molecular biologists. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Althusser dedicated the fourth lesson of his 'course of philosophy for scientists' at the Ecole Normale Supériere in the autumn of the 1967 to the inaugural lecture held by Jacques Monod at the Collège de France on 3 November in the same year. Althusser defined the concepts of 'living system' and of 'emergence' that Monod uses in his interpretation of evolution as 'materialist'; whereas he judged his conception of human history as the evolution of ideas in the 'noosphere' as 'idealistic'. Against the latter, Althusser counterposed a reading of Marx's work centred on the notion of 'structure' – which is very close to that of 'system' used within biology – and on the refusal of teleology and finalism. This last position, which Althusser takes up particularly in the writings of the 1980s on the 'materialism of the encounter', represent a particularly significant break with orthodox Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of order and randomness are crucial to understand 'living systems' structural and dynamical rules. In the history of biology, they lay behind the everlasting debate on the relative roles of chance and determinism in evolution. Jacques Monod [1970] built a theory where chance (randomness) and determinism (order) were considered as two complementary aspects of life. In the present paper, we will give an up to date version of the problem going beyond the dichotomy between chance and determinism. To this end, we will first see how the view on living systems has evolved from the mechanistic one of the 19th century to the one stemming from the most recent literature, where they emerge as complex systems continuously evolving through multiple interactions among their components and with the surrounding environment. We will then report on the ever increasing evidence of "friendly" co-existence in living beings between a number of "variability generators", fixed by evolution, and the "spontaneous order" derived from interactions between components. We will propose that the "disorder" generated is "benevolent" because it allows living systems to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment by continuously changing, while keeping their internal harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a student activity to understand what happens if Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria are allowed to grow unchecked in the absence of death. It is informed that in this activity, students must make conversions between metric and English systems in order to find out the volume of a room in terms of nonstandard units, cubic E. coli bacteria. Moreover, students are required to calculate surface area of the earth in terms of E. coli square units. This activity is named after Jacques Monod, a French biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.

Deals with the idea of biochemical unity, encapsulated in Jacques Monod's phrase "Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants". History of the concept of biochemical unity; Investigation of the two 'elephant' phrases and their possible relationships; Evolution of the phrase from the earlier version "From the elephant to butyric acid bacterium".

Synthesizing important research traditions in information theory, structuralist semiotics, and generative linguistics, at least three main types of semiotic indeterminacy must be distinguished: Kolmogorov's notion of randomness defined as sequential incompressibility, de Saussure's principle of contingency of sign which ensures the possibility of translation between different sign systems, and Chomsky's idea of indefiniteness in generative mechanisms as a requirement for the explanation of semiotic creativity. These types of semiotic indeterminacy form an abstract system useful for the description of concrete sign processes in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimension. In his philosophical reflections on modern biology, Jacques Monod used the conceptual opposition chance versus necessity to analyse several phenomena of indeterminacy (especially in molecular biology). The biosemiotic approach to life permits to apply the suggested system of semiotic indeterminacy on these phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Jacques Lucien Monod, a French biochemist, is presented. He was born on February 9, 1910 in Paris, France and studied basic sciences, including biology, chemistry, geology and zoology at Sorbonne. He then enrolled for fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (CIT), California, U.S. He married Odette Bruhl, an orientalist and had twin sons. His approach in molecular genetics is explored. He died on 31 May 1976 from viral hepatitis and aplastic anaemia.

Abstract: Between 1942 and 1956, Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology/Medicine, contributed a number of papers to the Annales de l’ Institut Pasteur, the ancestor of the journal “Research in Microbiology”. Circumstances that led him to publish in the “Annales” are recalled here. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of chemical arbitrariness, which he claimed allows those processes to "transcend the laws of chemistry". It seems natural, as some philosophers have done, to interpret this in modal terms: a biological relationship is chemically arbitrary if it is possible, within the constraints of chemical "law", for that relationship to have been otherwise than it is. But while modality is certainly important for understanding chemical arbitrariness, understanding its biological role also requires an account of the concrete causal-functional features that distinguish arbitrary from non-arbitrary phenomena. In this paper I elaborate on this under-emphasised aspect by offering a general account of these features: arbitrary relations are instantiated by mechanisms that involve molecular adapters , which causally couple two properties or processes which would otherwise be uncorrelated. Additionally, adapters work by acting as intermediate rather than cooperating causes. • Jacques Monod saw "chemical arbitrariness" as critical to certain molecular systems. • Modal interpretations of chemical arbitrariness fail to account for this importance. • This can be done by citing the key causal-functional features of arbitrary systems. • Chemically arbitrary causal relationships rely on one or more molecular adapters. • Adapters couple two processes by acting as intermediate , not cooperating, causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize" by Sean B. Carroll.

The author reflects on the different styles of science. He features the essay written by 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recipient Francois Jacob which describes day science as based on reasoning with certain results and night science as instinct or intuition-guided approach with unpredicted results. He also mentions the belief of Jacques Monod concerning the importance of studying biology in solving the relationship between human beings and the universe.

The article discusses about protein assemblies. According to the article, proteins are made of polypeptide chains that may combine to form quaternary structures. These structures permit proteins to have symmetries that becomes a significant role in allostery. A research is being conducted on whether this symmetry can be controlled by site-directed mutagenesis. The research concluded that some of the findings made before by Jacques Monod and his co-workers are confirmed to be correct such as an in a protein composed of several polypeptide chains with identical sequences, every structural feature is repeated a number of times that any alteration in contact between two subunits will affect all symmetry-related contacts.