The biologist François Gros, passionate regarding the molecular mechanisms of life, honorary professor at the College de France, former director of the Institut Pasteur, permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1991 to 2000, died on February 18, in Paris, at the age of 96.
Born April 24, 1925 in Paris, he left the capital for Honfleur, Brive and Toulouse during the Second World War, with part of his family, before returning in 1944 to continue his university studies. In 1945, he began a thesis on recently discovered antibiotics, soon admitted to the very young National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he would spend a large part of his career. In 1946 he entered the Institut Pasteur, with Michel Macheboeuf, whose premature death brought him into contact with Jacques Monod. He therefore devoted himself to the emerging molecular biology, of which he was one of the founders, and took part in the extraordinary intellectual ferment of the years 1955-1965.
He and Jacques Monod were more biochemists and molecular biologists than geneticists, unlike François Jacob and André Lwoff. This is how messenger RNA – a technology used by certain vaccines once morest Covid-19 – was co-discovered by two different routes: by François Gros and James Watson (who, with Francis Crick, had published in 1953 the duplicate structure DNA helix, and with whom he will do an internship at Harvard), as well as by François Jacob and Sydney Brenner. With immense modesty, François Gros has often affirmed that “Jacques Monod had planned everything”.
In 1962, at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology in Paris, he successfully created his own lab, quickly overcrowded and, following May 68, terribly poor: we counted sparingly, and sometimes we negotiated pipettes, filters and reagents, without that this burdens a lively creativity. There, he continued his work on the regulation of the expression of the genes of bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophages) through the dual analysis of messenger RNAs and the proteins for which they code.
Insatiable intellectual curiosity
After a stint at the Parisian faculty of Jussieu, he returned to the Institut Pasteur, now directed by Jacques Monod. Like many Pasteurians, he took the “big leap” from bacteria to vertebrates, without stopping at organisms of intermediate complexity, such as yeast or the Drosophila fly. In his laboratory at Pasteur and in that associated with his chair of Cellular Biochemistry at the Collège de France, where he was elected in 1973, he carried out, with major results, his research on the differentiation of higher organisms, particularly that of muscle cells.
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