Content area
Full Text
Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 64 (2007) 3149 3158 1420-682X/07/243149-10DOI 10.1007/s00018-007-7442-y Birkh user Verlag, Basel, 2007
Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences
Thoughts of a Senior Scientist Chance and necessity revisited
C. de Duve
de Duve Institute, Avenue Hippocrate 75, 1200 Brussels (Belgium), e-mail: [email protected]
Received 25 September 2007; accepted 26 September 2007 Online First 1 October 2007
Thirty-five years have gone by since the first appearance, in Paris, of a book that was to become a worldwide bestseller [1]. The book s title, Le Hasard et la N cessit (Chance and Necessity), was a gem, an inspiration for countless later expositions on the same topic. Its author, Jacques Monod, was one of France s most brilliant scientists, winner, with his mentor Andr Lwoff and his younger coworker Franois Jacob, of the 1965 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Monod died in 1976, merely 66 years of age. But the heated debates ignited by his book have still not come to an end. Scientists and philosophers looking at the place of life and mind in the universe continue to wrestle with the question: How much chance? How much necessity?
In his book, revealingly subtitled Essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology, Monod surveyed the remarkable advances made in basic biology since the end of World War II and tried to assess their philosophical significance. His scientific position is summed up in a single sentence: The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. His philosophy concludes the book: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out; nor is his duty.
When Monod s book came out, I was still immersed in the kind of biochemical and cell-biological research that has kept me busy during much of my life. I did, nevertheless, find the time to read the book and even reviewed it for a little-known Belgian monthly [2]. But my main interests were elsewhere. Since then, things have changed; I have closed my laboratories and now
devote most of my time to the issues raised by Monod. I have followed the research that has been done in this field over the last...