Background
Her father François Jacob (17 June 1920-1919 April 2013) was a French biologist, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Her father François Jacob (17 June 1920-1919 April 2013) was a French biologist, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
In the United States, she studied with some of the most highly esteemed professors, including Roger Brown and Jerry Kagan, who both urged her to stay at Harvard and pursue her career there.
She is also a trained scientist, studying the workings of the brain, the mind and thought. Having been awarded a grant from the Sachs Foundation, Odile Jacob went to Harvard University to work on a thesis on the acquisition of concepts in children. She was a pioneer and a precursor in this field, which at the time was neither taught nor researched in France.
At the same time, she received a similar offer from the Department of Cognitive Psychology at New York’s Rockefeller University, one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions.
Forced to return to France for family reasons, and realizing that French intellectual life needed to be rejuvenated, she decided to become a publisher. Her company"s goals were to give readers an understanding of the great scientific advances that have shaped and transformed our contemporary world and to make scientists and scholars internationally recognized.
Having shown that science was an integral part of culture, she aimed, through her own publishing activities, to support science and science education as well as to cast light on the major issues at stake in the contemporary world. The "Editions Odile Jacob" publishing company has brought together — in a single catalogue displaying more than 2,500 titles — works by some of the greatest scientific minds and by some of the most powerful international statesmen.
lieutenant has turned demanding, even scholarly works into best-selling books
The company has become a quasi-institution, imposing its imprint as a synonym not only for youth, modernity and creativity but also for rigor and reliability. Scientists and Nobel Prize winners from all over the world have chosen Odile Jacob to publish their works, such as Jean-Pierre Changeux, Ilya Prigogine, James Watson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Gerald Edelman, and Antonio Damasio. Jacob has also developed a strong list devoted to current affairs and politics: the current United States. President Barack Obama, the former United States. President George H. West. Bush, the United States. President Bill Clinton, the United States. President George West. Bush, the former United States. Secretary of the State Colin Powell, the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the former Soviet foreign affairs Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the late French President François Mitterrand, the former French President Jacques Chirac, and also the former European Commission Chairman Jacques Delors.
Jacob is an Officier in the National Order of the Legion of Honor (2010). 1991: Grand Prix de l’Information Scientifique by the French Academy of Sciences 1995: businesswoman of the year by the Veuve Clicquot Prize Jury 2005: recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Publishing in Turin, Italy and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne.
She is a member of Le Siècle.
