- Person
- François Jacob
- Lived
- 1920–2013
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- French
The story
By 1960 biologists knew that genes are made of DNA and that proteins are built on ribosomes, the cell’s protein factories. But how did the instructions get from one to the other? In Paris, François Jacob and Jacques Monod had concluded from their work on gene regulation that there must be a short-lived go-between: an RNA copy of each gene that carried its message to the ribosomes and was then quickly destroyed. They called it messenger RNA. Their colleague François Gros found support for the idea when he showed that blocking RNA production stopped protein production almost at once.
In June 1960 Jacob and Gros left for laboratories in the United States to test the idea. Jacob went to Matthew Meselson’s laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with the South African-born biologist Sydney Brenner. Their experiments repeatedly failed. In his memoir Jacob described how, after weeks of frustration, Brenner suddenly leapt up shouting that the problem was the magnesium. With more magnesium to hold the ribosomes together, the experiment worked.
In May 1961 two papers in Nature announced the discovery: one by Brenner, Jacob and Meselson, and a companion paper by Gros and colleagues working with James Watson at Harvard. They showed that unstable RNA molecules carry information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis. Jacob and Monod set out the full theory in a landmark paper the same year, and the discovery formed part of the work for which Jacob shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Messenger RNA became central to all of molecular biology. Six decades later it became a medicine. As the Pasteur Institute noted in 2021, the unstable messenger RNA discovered in 1961 is the basis of the COVID-19 vaccines given to people around the world, made possible by later techniques to stabilise the molecule and keep it very cold until use.
Why it matters
Messenger RNA explains how genes are turned into proteins and is the foundation of mRNA vaccines, including those used against COVID-19.
About François Jacob
Free French war hero and Pasteur Institute biologist who showed how genes are switched on and off and helped discover messenger RNA, the basis of mRNA medicine. Nobel Prize 1965.
More about François Jacob
Sources
- Discovery of messenger RNA in 1961 Institut Pasteur
- François Jacob, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- François Jacob Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.