This book will serve as an irreplaceable reference work for conservators, curators, collectors, dealers, conservation students, and photographers, as well as those in the general public seeking information on preserving this ubiquitous form ...

La Terre est un jardin bordé de nuit. Tels des aveugles nous avançons, mais sûrs de nous, fiers, cruels, consommateurs, assoiffés de profit. Modernes? Que restera-t-il à nos enfants de cette oasis si humaine? Seront-ils seulement là pour contempler nos méfaits? Verront-ils, comme nous, les fleurs, le désert, le ciel aux mille étoiles, la vie menacée, la guerre? Théodore Monod - qui avait seize ans quand les cloches de France sonnèrent la paix en 1918 - nous offre une méditation (...) lucide et pleine d'espoir. Il se bat aujourd'hui comme il l'a toujours fait. Et nous dit : ne mourons pas résignés devant nos ordinateurs. Dans le silence. Dans nos lits. Battons-nous. Cherchons le beau, le vrai. Ayons enfin le courage des larmes. Et révérons la vie. (shrink)

The first part of this paper has shown that the development of regulatory genetics and the lactose operon model stemmed from laboratory cultures rooted in local traditions. A "physiological" culture may be recognized in the Pasteurian context. The institutional continuity provided the basis for a tenuous link between Pasteur, Lwoff, and Monod. My claim is that the "national" value of regulatory and physiological genetics is an artifact produced in the course of the legitimization process accompanying the institutionalisation of the (...) discipline. In the 1960s, the lactose operon model was turned into a "flag-object," a symbol of the new culture. The work done by the Pasteurian group became therefore the most important, if not the only, exemplar of molecular biology in France.The second part o f the paper described the origins of general patterns that dominated the building of molecular biology in France. The study of the relationships between molecular biologists and biochemists or immunologists revealed the existence of alternatives to the development of operon research, or to the convergence with molecular biology. Both examples uncover specific paths leading to achievements that might be viewed as international trends: the expansion of RNA and translation studies, and the development of cellular immunology. They illustrate two possible patterns of linking local settings and disciplinary traditions: an oligopolistic situation where a few groups or one institution dominate an entire field, and the emergence of "collective" trends through collaboration networks or schools. (shrink)

During the first years of the post-war era, many French scientists travelled in the United States. As they looked for a reference to be used in rebuilding their own scientific landscape, their diaries say as much about the rise of the American biomedical complex as they do about their perception of research in the country. In order to illustrate how the French biologists adopted, competed with, or challenged the American model and how transatlantic exchanges played a critical role in the (...) molecularization of the life sciences, this paper presents three trajectories of laboratories. These include the services respectively led by P. Lépine and J. Monod at the Pasteur Institute, and G. Schapira’s biochemical research unit at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades. The three studies document the massive transatlantic circulation of materials, techniques, instruments, and people during the scientific reconstruction. The reconstruction however produced highly differentiated characters each operating in his own niche: the biotechnological inventor, the neo-clinician, and the fundamental biologist. The comparison situates the rise of molecular biology within the context of a rapidly expanding biomedical research system. It will help in understanding how, in contrast to the American situation, a logic of “demedicalization” became in France a means for developing biology at the molecular level. (shrink)

During the last twenty-five years or so there has been a remarkable growth in the interdisciplinary field bordering on cognitive psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. The book under review makes a belated but significant contribution to the literature of cognitive science, since it provides the first detailed comparison of the views of two of the field's most influential figures, Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget. The text is based on a conference which was held in (...) October of 1975 at the Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris. Besides Chomsky and Piaget, the participants at the conference included such notables as Jacques Monod and Gregory Bateson, the philosophers Jerry Fodor and Stephen Toulmin, psychologists Norbert Bischof, David Premack and Bärbel Inhelder, as well as distinguished representatives from the fields of biology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence. The major focus of the discussion concerned the differences between Chomsky's and Piaget's views on the nature/nurture question in psychology. (shrink)

Because this lecture was a tribute to the contribution of Monod to science it focused on his views, without discussing the work of others who contributed to his achievements. In particular, because Monod was implicitly a platonician/pythagorean (with his emphasis on the importance of beauty in things), he thought that symmetry had to be introduced in the concept of allostery. In fact this was an extra feature that was absent from the original work of Jean-Pierre Changeux on (...) the enzyme threonine deaminase, where the first hypothesis of the binding of a regulator molecule on the enzyme could be located at a place different from the catalytic substrate binding site was presented (hence the word allostery coined by Monod in the introduction of the conference where the work of Changeux was presented). Symmetry is not a critical component of the concept of allostery. (shrink)

Ce livre s'adresse à tous les " hommes et femmes de bonne volonté " à la recherche de la vérité. La première partie relate les réflexions que portent sur leur discipline les scientifiques tout au long du XXe siècle avec leur particularité voire leur opposition. C'est ainsi que Jacques Monod base sa réflexion sur le hasard conçu comme " une liberté absolue niais aveugle ", François Jacob sur le " jeu des possibles ", Alfred Kastler sur " une finalité (...) objective " et Trinh Xuan Thuan sur " les Lois de l'Univers avec des possibilités d'évolution ". Quant à Georges Charpack dans : " Soyez savants, soyez prophètes " il affirme ; " Ce qui reste la clef du problème que la science pose à la philosophie se trouve dans les lois de l'univers et dans l'interprétation de leur caractère. Nous n'avons rien trouvé qui réponde vraiment à nos désirs. Mais la question reste posée, non pas comme un défi aux philosophes, mais comme une requête instante posée à leur réflexion ". C'est à ce défi que cet ouvrage essaie de répondre, remettant en question certains concepts philosophiques pour accéder à une néo-métaphysique réclamée par les scientifiques. Par une étude synthétique du passage du polythéisme au monothéisme jusqu'au seuil de la Révélation Chrétienne, l'auteur développe le concept original néo-métaphysique de " l'Etre et de l'étant " appliqué à l'Univers. Ce concept permet une avancée décisive dans la recherche de la Vérité sur Dieu, faisant apparaître une corrélation inédite avec le prologue de l'Evangile de Saint Jean. (shrink)

The discovery of the concrete basis for genes, and especially the clarification of mechanisms regulating gene expressions (in particular those that bear on the stepwise processing of hereditary information from the sequences of DNA nucleotides to the proteins) was to give flesh to the concept of a genetic program, for these regulations introduce relationships of order between the various elements of information contained in the genes. These order relations are then revealed during the time-dependent expression of the genetic program. They (...) can lead, in the case of a given program, to a plethora of particular outcomes, because the number of possible combinations rapidly becomes enormous. Since the discoveries of Jacob and Monod, it is clear that the genes specifying the regulatory functions will be responsible for phenotypic variability, especially for the apparently ideal adaptation of a living organism to its environment, and more generally for all the genotype-bound manifestations as they unfold in time. -/- Thus we are led to consider three particular characteristics that allow for the representation of living beings: a program, which summarizes the hereditary constraints and is, in fact, the abstract notion underlying the definition of all individuals in a given class (species); an initial state of the system that represents the context in which the program must express itself at the time of the individual's birth; and a particular outcome of each program, which coincides with individual development. The set of all outcomes constitutes the genetic envelope and allows the essential characteristics of the program to be obtained by induction. Theoretically, a structured set equivalent to the aforementioned one could be reconstructed by providing the program, the initial state, and the totality of the events of the external environment, producing any interaction whatever with the individual. -/- As a consequence, the observation of a phenotype does not tell in any straightforward way, what is the direct consequence of the expression of a particular gene, or of a specific feature of the environment. A phenocopy is a particular example of a phenotype that is the result of a gene expression mimicking a particular gene-directed phenotype, without however corresponding to a pparticular mutation of a known gene. (shrink)