Jacques Monod Quotes

The first scientific postulate is the objectivity of nature: nature does not have any intention or goal.

From then on I read avidly the first publications by the "phage-church", and when I entered Lwoff’s department at the Pasteur Institute in 1945, I was tempted to abandon enzyme adaptation in order to join the church myself and work with bacteriophage.

Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants.

There is in science, however, quite a gap between belief and certainty. But would one ever have the patience to wait and to establish the certainty if the inner conviction were not already there?

One day, almost exactly 25 years ago - it was at the beginning of the bleak winter of 1940 - I entered ’s office at the Pasteur Institute. I wanted to discuss with him some of the rather surprising observations I had recently made.
I was working then at the old Sorbonne, in an ancient laboratory that opened on a gallery full of stuffed monkeys. Demobilized in August in the Free Zone after the disaster of 1940, I had succeeded in locating my family living in the Northern Zone and had resumed my work with desperate eagerness. I interrupted work from time to time only to help circulate the first clandestine tracts. I wanted to complete as quickly as possible my doctoral dissertation, which, under the strongly biometric influence of Georges Teissier, I had devoted to the study of the kinetics of bacterial growth. Having determined the constants of growth in the presence of different carbohydrates, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to determine the same constants in paired mixtures of carbohydrates. From the first experiment on, I noticed that, whereas the growth was kinetically normal in the presence of certain mixtures (that is, it exhibited a single exponential phase), two complete growth cycles could be observed in other carbohydrate mixtures, these cycles consisting of two exponential phases separated by a complete cessation of growth.

What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn’t really get to interesting results; let’s talk in terms of general systems theory ... there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it’s impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless.

If [the emergence of the human species] was unique, as may perhaps have been the appearance of life itself, then before it did appear its chances of doing so were infinitely slender. The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.

The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. ... Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.