Book Review : A Scientist Finds the Man Within

The Statue Within: An Autobiography by Francois Jacob, translated by Franklin Philip (Sloan Foundation Science Series/Basic Books; $22.95; 336 pages)

Most memoirs by distinguished scientists are heavy with science, which is perfectly understandable and frequently interesting, but which gives their books a somewhat limited appeal.

“The Statue Within” by Francois Jacob, a Nobel-Prize-winning French biologist, is a most-welcome exception to the rule. It contains virtually no science (well, just a little), but it is a splendid account of one man’s inner world and of his interaction with reality out there. In this eloquent book, Jacob tells us much more about life than he tells us about biology.

I cannot recall a book by a scientist quite like this one. The science is almost an afterthought, relegated to a few dozen pages at the end. Much more important to Jacob than his prize-winning work on gene regulation are the uncertainties of his life, the poignant moments, the people he met and the choices he made, frequently without knowing he was making them.

Life’s Quandaries

Jacob makes his emphasis and his tone clear from the outset. He is concerned with life’s quandaries, its contradictions and its messiness. Heroes are never all heroic, and great men are never all great. Real lives are many-faceted, and the facets frequently pull in conflicting directions.

“The march of science does not consist of a series of inevitable conquests, or advance along the royal road of human reason, or result necessarily and inevitably from conclusive observations dictated by experiment and argumentation,” Jacob writes near the beginning of the book.

“Those in the front ranks (of science) displayed exotic blends of passion and indifference, of rigor and whimsy, of naivete and the will to power, in a triumph of individuality.”

A large chunk of the book concerns Jacob’s experiences during World War II, when he served with the Free French forces of Charles de Gaulle in North Africa. He had been a medical student before the war, and though he had not yet completed his degree, he worked as a combat doctor and was wounded twice. Several of his close friends were killed.

In one extraordinary scene, Jacob, unarmed, was walking one moonlit night in Tunisia when he came face to face with a Nazi soldier carrying a submachine gun. They looked at each other, Jacob kept walking, and the enemy soldier never fired. To this day, Jacob wonders why.

Years later, Jacob still thinks about the war. “Sometimes, in the night, I wake up with a start,” he says. “In a sweat. Gasping. Hardly able to breathe. Immobilized by anxiety. Astounded to find myself in this bedroom. To have emerged from the nightmare.” He leaves the room and walks to the room where his four children lie asleep.

“I draw a blanket over one. Put a foot under a sheet. Fascinated by this marvelous quartet, I stand for a while looking at this desire for the future gleam in the dark. Hearing sing, like the libretto of some unfamiliar music, this promise of immortality. Only these children’s faces can blot out the faces of the dead.”

But the book is not the war stories and irrelevant memoirs of a distinguished scientist. Self-doubt runs through his life, which is very unusual for scientists’ autobiographies, most of which portray a straight-line progression from school to laboratory to discovery to success with hardly a misstep along the way.

‘A Point of Anguish’

Jacob scoffs: “What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food. He denies that life bounces along at random, at the mercy of events, in sound and in fury. He wants it always to be directed, aimed toward a goal, like an arrow.”

Though life rarely is this way, Jacob says, the telling of a life is almost always an effort to show how one event followed another and to imbue the story with meaning. In the process, he says, the most interesting parts are left out.

He would like to tell the story of his scientific work, he says, but, “My memory of it is frozen. It has lost its color, dried up in a story too often told, too often formulated. A story that has become so logical, so reasonable as to have lost all juice, no longer conveying the sound and the fury of the daily research. What gave it life has been swallowed up by time. . . .

‘A Fine Story’

“Everything has become smooth and polished. A fine story, very clear, with beginning, middle and end. With well-oiled, well-articulated, well-arranged experiments, one following another, leading without fault, without hesitation, in seamless argumentation, to a well-established truth. The truth found in textbooks on genetics.”

The truth in life and in science is not like that. The fringes of experience are more interesting and more revealing than the focus. What is left out is more important than what is put in.

Jacob seeks to rectify this frequent mistake. His splendid autobiography is a revealing account of the life of a man, not just a scientist.