Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Man
By M.F. Perutz
The Statue Within: An Autobiography
by François Jacob, translated by Franklin Philip
Basic Books, 326 pp., $22.95
When they write their autobiographies successful people often follow the pattern of Charlie Chaplin, who in My Autobiography first delights us with his youthful acting talent, which raised him to fame and fortune from a childhood of penury and want, and then bores us with an enumeration of his movies and all the important people he has met. By contrast, François Jacob gives no hint that he is now president of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a Nobel Laureate, and one of the world's leading biologists. He presents us with a remarkable life that is symbolic of the tragedy and rebirth of France. Jacob was born in Paris in 1920, of well-to-do Jewish middle-class parents, and had a happy childhood. He attended school in Paris, intending at first to become a soldier like his maternal grandfather, the four-star Jewish general in the French artillery, a wise man full of vigor and courage, a patriot yet no chauvinist, a humane soldier who was the 'statue within' of the title, and on whom young François tried to model himself. The obligatory stepping stone to a military career was the Ecole Polytechnique, but the Draconian teachers of the lycée that prepared boys for entry to that famous institution were so sadistic that Jacob quit and decided to become a surgeon instead.
Review, 3150 words
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