Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

FOUR DECADES OF FRANCO-AMERICAN COLLABORATION IN BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY GEORGES N. COHEN* Before World War II, the exchanges between France and the United States in the field of biochemistry and biology in general were minimal. This was due in great part to the fact that the centers of excellence were in western Europe and also to the fact that the official French biologists in charge of university departments did not consider scientists like Monod, Lwoff, and Ephrussi as regular members of the establishment. It should be noted that in 1944, these three scientists were, respectively, 34, 43, and 43 years old. Fortunately, there existed and still exist two institutions, the Institut de Biologie Physico-chimique and the Institut Pasteur, where creative and "unconventional" research could be carried out. However, exchanges had not been totally absent: Boris Ephrussi had gone to the California Institute of Technology, and George Beadle had come to work with him at the Institut de Biologie Physico-chimique, where they laid, without knowing it, the foundations of biochemical genetics (with Drosophila). This was the beginning in their minds of the one gene-one enzyme concept, although they did not use the expression then; it appeared first after the classical work of Beadle and Tatum with Neurospora (the principle was already present in the 1902 paper of Garrod on alcaptonuria [I]). When Ephrussi went to Caltech, he persuaded Jacques Monod to come with him. In addition to learning Drosophila genetics, Monod discovered a world very different from the old, dusty Sorbonne—absence of the Herr Professor attitudes, free exchange of ideas, lively critical discussions, and friendly cooperation. Owing to the Nazi and Fascist persecutions, some of the scientists who eventually were to emigrate to the United States came first to Paris *Cellular Biochemistry Unit, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Institut Pasteur, 28, rue du Docteur Roux, 75724 Paris Cedex 15, France.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/86/2932/$0 1.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 29, 3, Part 2 ¦ Spring 1986 \ S141 before fleeing again when the Germans invaded our country. I was then a very young man, but I remember very vividly Otto Meyerhof and David Nachmansohn. Among others, Salvatore Luria, a refugee from Italy, was working with Holweck at the Institut du Radium in Paris and had learned the techniques of phage plating with Eugène Wollman. In 1940, Louis Rapkine was in London as part of the French mission to Great Britain. When France collapsed in June, he became the leader of the French scientists in London, and, since America was not yet in the war, he went to New York, where he established an office in the New York School for Social Research and close ties with the Rockefeller Foundation. He gathered money from wealthy French families in America as well as various grants and almost single-handedly managed to bring to the United States scores of French scientists and their families, securing chairs, research fellowships, educational facilities, housing, and medical care. This extraordinary and hazardous exodus out of German-occupied France proved miraculous in its success rate: Lasting ties were established between American scientists and the exiled French, who participated in the war effort and were kept abreast of new knowledge and scientific progress during the hostilities and were free to participate in the restoration of French scientific achievement in the future . In 1945, at the end of the war, the reputation of André Lwoff as a protozoologist and nutritionist was already established. He hadjust published his famous book, l'Evolution physiologique [2], in which he had summed up 2 decades of scientific work devoted to (1) identifying, among other things, the vitamin nicotinic acid as the precursor of pyridine nucleotide coenzymes and (2) establishing the latter and hematin as growth factors for Hemophilus and trypanosomes. Part ofthe work had been done in Meyerhof's laboratory in Germany. During the war, Jacques Monod completed his Ph.D. thesis on the growth of bacterial cultures. In 1941, the importance and originality of his work passed unnoticed, to the point that the holder of the chair of zoology in whose department Monod was working...