Des Hommes Engagés

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-enProvence, 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 littleknown 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