born June 17, 1920, Nancy, France
French biologist.
After receiving his doctorate, he went to work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Beginning in 1958, he worked with Jacques Monod studying the regulation of bacterial enzyme synthesis. They discovered regulator genes, so called because they control the activities of other genes. Jacob and Monod also proposed the existence of an RNA messenger, a partial copy of DNA that carries genetic information to other parts of the cell. The two men shared a 1965 Nobel Prize with André Lwoff.