A Revolutionary Meeting of Minds

Home , Albert Camus, Jacques Monod

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Both French Resistance firebrands in the war-torn 1940s, molecular geneticist Jacques Monod (left) and writer Albert Camus later became friends.

MOLECULAR GENETICS August 1944, when the Resistance fought German troops in the streets of Paris. Camus joined a Resistance cell and wrote editorials for its newspaper, Combat. Carroll A revolutionary brings out how each man managed to pur- sue his vocation under the most dangerous of circumstances. Monod moved to a now legendary attic laboratory at the Pasteur meeting of minds Institute with Lwoff. Meanwhile, Camus continued to write, publishing L’Étranger (The Outsider) in 1942 and establishing Jan Witkowski relishes the interwoven stories of Nobel his place among the French intelligentsia laureates Jacques Monod and Albert Camus. with his then friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a shared revulsion at Soviet biolo- n Brave Genius, the biologist Sean was part-way through his thesis at the Sor- gist Trofim Lysenko’s genetics theory that Carroll tells the stories of two remark- bonne, studying the growth of bacteria. That brought Monod and Camus together. In able men whose lives intersected in the year he discovered ‘adaptation’, the lag that August 1948, the Paris Communist paper Iaftermath of the Second World War, spark- occurs when bacteria that are growing in a Les Lettres Françaises extolled Lysenko’s ing a rare communion of spirit. Jacques medium with two sugars exhaust the first work as “A Great Scientific Event”. Three Monod was a founder of molecular genetics and switch to the second. The observation weeks later, Monod wrote a counterblast who, with biologists André Lwoff and Fran- led to his life’s work exploring the regula- in Combat, declaring çois Jacob, received the 1965 Nobel Prize tion of gene expression in bacteria. Around Lysenko’s work non- in Physiology or Medicine. Novelist and the same time, Camus arrived in Paris from scientific. By this time, philosopher Albert Camus was another Algeria. Already an experienced reporter Camus had come Nobel laureate, receiving the 1957 literature and editor, he found a job at the newspaper to believe that any prize for work “which with clear-sighted Paris-Soir, but he had grander ambitions: totalitarian regime, earnestness illuminates the problems of the to write about the absurd. In this philoso- including those of human conscience in our times”. Just over phy, the Universe has no goal or meaning. communist states, was two years later, Camus died in a car crash. Far from being a credo of despair, it urges inherently corrupt — Both men were fearless in their fight people to recognize the absurd and live life a view confirmed by against the German invaders; both were to the full. Brave Genius: conversations with geniuses in their own spheres; and the two As Carroll shows, each man heeded A Scientist, a the Hungarian-born were united in their world views. Monod’s French general Charles de Gaulle’s call Philosopher, writer Arthur Koes- scientific outlook informed Camus’s work, that “all free Frenchmen, wherever they and Their Daring tler, whose anti-total- and Camus’s philosophy greatly influenced be, should continue the fight as best they Adventures itarian novel Darkness from the French Monod, so much so that Carroll calls Monod may”. Monod distributed Résistance, a Resistance to the at Noon had infuri- “Camus in a lab coat”. clandestine newspaper, and later joined a Nobel Prize ated communists. Carroll’s story takes off in Paris in 1940, group that sabotaged German supply lines. SEAN B. CARROLL Camus was work- the year the city fell to the Germans. Monod He played a leading part in the rebellion of Crown: 2013. ing on L’ Ho m m e

Révolté (The Rebel), his long essay on the nature of revolution. He was introduced to Monod and, as Car- roll puts it, they “hit it off right away”. Monod helped Camus with a chapter on how communism had perverted science in the Soviet Union, exemplified by Lysenko. (The cruel Soviet suppression of Hungary’s 1956 uprising put the seal on their mutual rejection of communism.) Camus’s influence on Monod is clear in Le Hasard et La Necessité (Chance and Necessity; Seuil, 1970), the international best-seller in which Monod drew on the new science of molecular biology. Biology, for instance, had demonstrated that Homo sapiens arose through a series of chance events and that there is no grand design to the Universe. In a reference to Camus’s world view, Monod wrote that man “lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his Winston Churchill on a voyage across the Atlantic in October 1941. crimes”. In the late 1950s, Monod carried out experiments with François Jacob and ATOMIC SCIENCE biochemist Arthur Pardee that hinted at the existence of an unstable intermediate between DNA and ribosomes. Further work by Monod and Jacob led to the Winston and operon model of how gene expression is regulated, described in a classic paper in 1961. The same year Jacob, with biologists Sydney Brenner and Matt Meselson, pro- the warheads vided the experimental confirmation by demonstrating the existence of messenger RNA. The Nobel prize for Monod, Jacob Richard Rhodes explores a history of Britain’s little- and Lwoff followed. known role in the race to develop an atomic bomb. The journalist Jean Daniel observed of the comradeship between Monod and Camus that there was “a complicity so ritain and the United States, which fleeing the Nazis sup- intense ... that only a shared kindness of cooperated so effectively as military plied a cadre of highly heart allowed them not to find unwelcome allies during the Second World War, motivated physicists those who interfered in their privacy”. Bcollaborated only intermittently — and from to investigate the I am not sure that Carroll has conveyed the British point of view inadequately — in explosive properties that intensity — perhaps no one can. But the development of the first atomic bombs. of uranium at a time although Brave Genius is a long and com- The US side of the story has been told more when most British plex book, Carroll does a masterful job of than once; the British side, not recently physicists were work- keeping the many elements together and explored, is now tackled by Graham Farmelo ing on radar. In fact, it Churchill’s Bomb: the story moving. I learned much about in Churchill’s Bomb. was the refugee scien- HISTORICAL/ALAMY COLLECTION EVERETT A Hidden History France at the time of the Second World The author, a physicist, ranges across Win- of Science, War tists who first alerted War, and was prompted to reread Camus’s ston Churchill’s long career — from 1901, and Politics the British govern- great novel La Peste (The Plague). when Churchill wrote to H. G. Wells to con- GRAHAM FARMELO ment to German ura- In 1959, C. P. Snow wrote of the “two gratulate him on Anticipations, a work of pre- Faber & Faber: 2013. nium research, just as cultures” — that gulf between science and dictive non-fiction, to his final turn as prime their US counterparts the humanities. Brave Genius provides an minister in the early 1950s, when he pushed famously enlisted Albert Einstein to alert opportunity for those on both sides of the for a British hydrogen bomb. Farmelo is espe- President Franklin Roosevelt. divide to sample a potent mix of genet- cially good on the Second World War years, On both sides of the Atlantic, however, ics, philosophy and literature, forged in revealing much about the Anglo–American gatekeeper scientific advisers delayed pro- the twentieth-century tumult of war and relationship that has been guarded or unclear. gress. In the US case, the culprit was a gov- cold war. ■ British work on the bomb preceded that ernment scientist named Lyman Briggs. by the United States. Britain was at war for Briggs, the director of the National Bureau of Jan Witkowski is executive director of more than two years before the United States Standards, so overemphasized secrecy that the Banbury Center, Cold Spring Harbor came in, and was inevitably more urgently the meeting minutes he received from the Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New concerned with German uranium research. MAUD committee — the group of British York, USA. Moreover, Britain’s generous policy of tak- officials tasked with researching the feasibil- e-mail: [email protected] ing in refugee Jewish scientists who were ity of building an atomic bomb — languished