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 ribosome s, 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 operon s, 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 (190294).