Francois Jacob Born 1920 in Nancy, France. Completed M.D. degree (1947) at Faculty of Paris, and a obtained doctorate in Science (1954) at the Sorbonne. Joined Institute Pasteur as research assistant (1950), under Dr. André Lwoff. Appointed Laboratory Director (1956) and Head of Dept. of Cell Genetics (1960). Began collaboration with Monod (1958) at Institute Pasteur. In 1964 became a Professor...

Marie-Anne Félix is a Research Director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) and a Principal Investigator at the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. She started her scientific career in cell biology, and later turned to development and evolution. In the last years, her laboratory focused on evolution of vulva development in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and othe...

Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences and Science Education, Haifa University, Oranim, 36006 Tivon, Israel Institut Jacques Monod, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris Diderot, Batiment Buffon, 5 Rue Thomas Mann, 75205 Paris Cedex 13, France Corresponding author. Tel: +972 4 98 38 988; Fax: +972 4 95 39 608; E-mail: [email protected] Corresponding autho...

The 50th anniversary of the classic Monod-Wyman-Changeux (MWC) model provides an opportunity to survey the broader conceptual and quantitative implications of this quintessential biophysical model. With the use of statistical mechanics, the mathematical implementation of the MWC concept links problems that seem otherwise to have no ostensible biological connection including ligand-receptor bind...

Hemoglobin is a classical model allosteric protein. Research on hemoglobin parallels the development of key cooperativity and allostery concepts, such as the 'all-or-none' Hill formalism, the stepwise Adair binding formulation and the concerted Monod-Wymann-Changuex (MWC) allosteric model. While it is clear that the MWC model adequately describes the cooperative binding of oxygen to hemoglobin,...