The University of Paris where André Michel Lwoff received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Medicine, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
Gallery of André Lwoff
Jahnstraße 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
The Max Planck Institute for Medical Research where André Michel Lwoff studied the development of flagellates from 1932 to 1933.
Gallery of André Lwoff
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
The University of Cambridge where André Michel Lwoff studied in 1936.
Career
Gallery of André Lwoff
1971
André Lwoff (on the right) in the Netherlands.
Gallery of André Lwoff
1980
Amsterdam, Netherlands
(From left to right) André Lwoff, Andrew Young (former United States Ambassador to the United Nations), Ramsey Clark (former minister of the United States Department of Justice) and Joop den Uyl (a Dutch politician)at a conference in Amsterdam on May 13, 1980.
Gallery of André Lwoff
André Michel Lwoff
Gallery of André Lwoff
(From left to right) François Jacob, Jacques Lucien Monod, and André Lwoff in a laboratory.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Legion of Honour
The Commander's insignia of the Legion of Honour which André Lwoff received in 1965 for his efforts in resisting the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War.
Leeuwenhoek Medal
The Leeuwenhoek Medal which André Lwoff obtained from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and Arts in 1960.
Nobel Prize in Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Medicine for his lysogeny studies which André Lwoff shared with Jacques Lucien Monod and Francois Jacob in 1965.
Resistance Medal
The Resistance Medal which André Lwoff received for his efforts in resisting the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War.
(From left to right) André Lwoff, Andrew Young (former United States Ambassador to the United Nations), Ramsey Clark (former minister of the United States Department of Justice) and Joop den Uyl (a Dutch politician)at a conference in Amsterdam on May 13, 1980.
The Commander's insignia of the Legion of Honour which André Lwoff received in 1965 for his efforts in resisting the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War.
André Michel Lwoff was a French microbiologist whose name is associated with lysogeny. His seminal work in the genetic control of virus synthesis has helped guide successive generations of scientists toward a new outlook on cell physiology. Studying microbiology, the scientist conducted researches on the genetics of bacteria and the mechanisms of viral infection and replication.
Background
Ethnicity:
Lwoff’s parents came to France from Russia in the late nineteenth century.
André Michel Lwoff was born on May 8, 1902, in Ainay-le-château, Auvergne, France. He was a son of Solomon Lwoff, a physician in a psychiatric hospital, and Marie Lwoff (maiden name Siminovitch), a sculptor.
Education
André Michel Lwoff was raised in the atmosphere of art and science. From his mother, an artist and sculptor, who cultivated in her son love to painting, listening to music and reading, the boy inherited an artistic temperament. The passion for science was developed by his father who often brought little André with him on his daily rounds. Lwoff spent much time of his youth in a rural community not far from Paris.
Lwoff studied medicine at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) following the advice of his father. Although the field could provide him with a comfortable living, his real major avenue of the study was biology. That is why he spent his summers at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Roscoff, in Britanny. Lwoff graduated from Sorbonne with a Bachelor of Science degree in the natural sciences in 1921.
The same year, he joined the Institute Pasteur in Paris where he studied under respected microbiologists Edouard Chatton and Félix Mesnil. While conducting research part-time at the Institute, Lwoff pursued his work on a medical degree which he obtained in 1927. Five years later, he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in natural science.
In 1932, the scientist received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which allowed him to study haematin and the development of flagellates for a year in the laboratory of Otto Meyerhof at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (currently the Planck Institute for Medical Research) of Heidelberg. Another grant from the Foundation provided the scientist with seven months of researches at the University of Cambridge in 1936.
Besides, during his lifetime, Lwoff received four honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Sciences from the University of Chicago and the Oxford University, both in 1959, a Doctor of Laws from the University of Glasgow (1963), and a Doctor of Medicine from the Catholic University of Louvain (1966).
The start of André Michel Lwoff’s career can be counted from 1921 when he joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he had a great opportunity to develop his skills as a lab assistant to microbiologists Edouard Chatton and Felix Mesnil. Lwoff’s keen intellect was first applied to morphological studies of protozoa, one-celled animals that often live as parasites on other animals. The scientist focused specifically on ciliates, which are covered with cilia (hair-like structures), and discovered a new species of ciliated protozoa. These studies eventually culminated in the discovery of the extranuclear inheritance characteristic of these organisms and earned Lwoff recognition as a leader in protozoology.
Lwoff next turned his attention to an even simpler form of life, bacteria. The scientific community at that time primarily studied bacteria in terms of their role in petrification, fermentation, and the biological factors involved in disease. Lwoff, however, was more interested in the general biological properties of bacteria. Focusing on how such simple organisms get nutrition, he discovered how to produce chemically defined media for their growth, a discovery that led him to identify specific growth factors identified as vitamins. Lwoff's discovery astounded the scientific community because it pointed to the bacterium as an organism much like higher organisms that need nutritional factors to grow and survive. Lwoff continued his research on vitamins, analyzing how vitamin deficiencies cause interruptions at certain points during metabolic processes.
In 1936, in collaboration with his wife, the biologist published what was to become an extremely influential paper on how vitamins function as coenzymes, small molecules that help the larger enzyme molecules perform their catalytic functions. These discoveries revealed Lwoff’s gifted intuitive approach to research and demonstrated the unity of biochemical action in all living things. In 1938, the Pasteur Institute made Lwoff the chief of a new program focusing on the emerging field of microbial physiology.
During the 1930s, André Michel Lwoff developed a friendship with Eugene Wollman, a pioneer researcher of lysogenic bacteria, which have the hereditary power to produce bacteriophage or bacterial viruses. Initial interest in bacteriophages stemmed from scientists who thought it might be possible to use bacteriophages to fight specific diseases. Although this approach was, for the most part, ineffective, scientists were intrigued by the phenomenon since the appearance and disappearance of phages was highly unpredictable.
By the early 1940s, lysogeny had become an area that was considered of little importance by the young school of American bacterial virologists. The advance of World War II further disrupted the study of it. From 1942 to 1946, Lwoff took an active part at a resistance group in France that focused primarily on gathering intelligence for the Allies. He managed to escape capture when his underground network was destroyed by the Gestapo, who arrested many of Lwoff’s compatriots. But Lwoff was soon involved in another underground network. He also hid American airmen in his apartment as they tried to make their way to unoccupied France after having been shot down over Nazi territory.
At war’s end, the scientist chose to continue the work of his friends the Wollmans. Lwoff began working with a lysogenic strain of soil bacteria called Bacillus megaterium and a second strain of bacteria susceptible to phage infection.
Lwoff next theorized that some external environmental stimulus could interfere with the dormant merger of phage particles and host DNA and thus cause the production of bacteriophage. After months and months of experiments, Lwoff and his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute decided to irradiate the bacteria with ultraviolet light, which normally kills bacteria and bacteriophages. To their surprise, they found that ultraviolet light caused the phage to multiply and eventually destroy the bacterial cell. Lwoff would later tote this discovery as one of the most thrilling of his scientific career. Further research showed that other stimuli, including chemicals that were known to cause cancers, could produce the same effect.
Unfortunately for many of his devotees, André Michel Lwoff was in no position to take them under his wing. His quarters in the attic of the Pasteur Institute were cramped and crowded with equipment. At the Institute, the biologist was not obligated to teach and preferred to dedicate his time to his research. Although, from 1959 to his retirement from the Institute in 1968 he served as a professor of microbiology at the Sorbonne in Paris. After retirement, Lwoff occupied the post of a director of the Cancer Research Institute at nearby Villejuif and held the position till 1972.
Quotations:
"The researcher’s art is first of all to find himself a good boss."
"The danger of parachuting young enthusiastic scientists into a flower bed of selected data and fully bloomed conceptions should be underestimated."
"The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo."
"For the philosopher, order is the entirety of repetitions manifested, in the form of types or of laws, by perceived objects. Order is an intelligible relation. For the biologist, order is a sequence in space and time. However, according to Plato, all things arise out of their opposites. Order was born of the original disorder, and the long evolution responsible for the present biological order necessarily had to engender disorder.
An organism is a molecular society, and biological order is a kind of social order. Social order is opposed to revolution, which is an abrupt change of order, and to anarchy, which is the absence of order."
Membership
André Michel Lwoff was an Honorary Member of the Harvey Society, the American Society of Biological Chemists, the Society for General Microbiology, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and a Corresponding Member of the Botanical Society of America.
In France, he was a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Société Zoologique de France (Zoological Society of France), the Société française de Microbiologie (Society of Microbiology), and the Société de Pathologie exotique (Society of Exotic Pathology) among others.
He also was involved in the activity of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
Personality
Different sides of Andre Michel Lwoff’s personality were reported by his former students and colleagues who contributed essays in celebration of the “fiftieth anniversary of [Lwoff’s] immersion in biology” published in the 1971 book ‘Of Microbes and Life’. Salvador Edward Luria, for example, aptly described Lwoff’s Renaissance nature, which made him so interesting to so many of his fellow scientists.
As Dr. Claudine Escoffier-Lambiotte wrote in Le Monde soon after Lwoff’s death, the scientist was strongly opposed to capital punishment, and passionate about painting, sculpture, and music. Escoffier-Lambiotte also noted that on the one hand, Lwoff had “those things that awaken the spirit” and on the other, he possessed of “total absence from conformity and diplomacy” which often pushed many of his colleagues aside.
Andre Michel Lwoff was also noted for his marvelous sense of humor and enthusiasm, which, to the careful reader, would often shine through in even his most scientific papers.
Quotes from others about the person
"Andre Lwoff – scientist, painter, master of language, leader of one of the great schools of biology – is a prototype scientist-humanist, in whom the ‘two cultures,’ supposedly divergent and losing touch of each other, remain happily married."
Interests
music, painting, sculpture, philosophy
Connections
André Michel Lwoff married a French microbiologist and virologist Marguerite Bourdaleix on December 5, 1925. André and Marguerite collaborated throughout Lwoff’s life both working at Pasteur Institute.