Former director of the Institut Pasteur and adviser of several governments under François Mitterrand died on February 18, at the age of 96.
by Philippe Kourilsky ( Honorary Professor at the College of France, Honorary Director General of the Pasteur Institute)
The biologist François Gros, passionate about the molecular mechanisms of the living, honorary professor at the College of France, former director of the Institut Pasteur, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1991 to 2000, died on February 18, in Paris, at the age of 96 years.
Born on April 24, 1925 in Paris, he left the capital for Honfleur, Brive and Toulouse during the Second World War, with a part of his family, before returning to 1944 to continue his university studies. In 1945, he started a thesis on the antibiotics recently discovered, soon admitted to the very young National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) where he will carry out a large part of his career. He enters 1946 at the Pasteur Institute at Michel Macheboeuf whose premature death makes him meet Jacques Monod. It is therefore dedicated to the nascent molecular biology, of which he is one of the founders, and participates in the extraordinary intellectual bubbling of the years 1955-1965.
Jacques Monod and him were more biochemist and molecular biologists than geneticists, unlike François Jacob and André Lwoff. This is how the messenger RNA – a technology used by some Vaccines against CVIV-19 – was coded by two different ways: by François Gros and James Watson (who, with Francis Crick, had published in 1953 the duplicate structure DNA propeller, and at whom he will do an internship in Harvard), as well as by François Jacob and Sydney Brenner. Of immense modesty, François Big has often claimed that “Jacques Monod had all planned”.
In 1962, at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology in Paris, he successfully creates his own lab, quickly overcrowded and, after May 68, terribly poor: we counted parly, and sometimes we had pipettes, filters and reagents , without having a perennial creativity. It continues its work on the regulation of the expression of the genes of bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophages) by the double bias of the analysis of the messengers RNAs and the proteins for which they codes.
Insatiable Intellectual Curiosity
After a passage through the Parisian Faculty of Jussieu, he returned to the Pasteur Institute, now led by Jacques Monod. Like many pastorists, it makes the “big jump” bacteria to vertebrates, without stopping intermediate complexity organisms, such as yeast or drrosophila fly. In his laboratory of Pasteur and in that associated with his Chair of Cellular Biochemistry of the College de France, where he was elected in 1973, he deploys, with major results, his research on the differentiation of higher organisms, particularly that of muscle cells.
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