Monod, Jacques (zhäk mônō`), 1910–76, French biologist, educated at the Univ. of Paris (D.Sc., 1941). He was a leader of the French resistance in World War II. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with André Lwoff and François Jacob for discoveries concerning molecular genetic mechanisms inside body cells. His publications include Chance and Necessity (1971) and Of Microbes and Life (ed. with Ernest Borek, 1971).

Monod, Jacques (Lucien)

(born Feb. 9, 1910, Paris, France—died May 31, 1976, Cannes) French biochemist. In 1961 he and Francois Jacob proposed the existence of messenger RNA (mRNA), theorizing that the messenger carries the information encoded in the base sequence to the ribosomes, where the sequence of bases of the messenger RNA is translated into the sequence of amino acids of a protein. In advancing the concept of gene complexes that they called operons, they suggested the existence of a class of genes that regulate the function of other genes by regulating the synthesis of mRNA. The two shared a 1965 Nobel Prize with André Lwoff (1902–94).