Unknown author · Public domain

François Jacob served in the French Resistance during World War II, work for which he received the Cross of Liberation, the Légion d'honneur, and the Croix de guerre. Returning to science afterward, he worked out with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff how genes switch each other on and off to control enzyme production in cells, foundational to modern molecular biology, and the three shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He later wrote several books of popular science and memoir.