Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up…

- Francois Jacob

It is hope that gives life meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks b…

- Francois Jacob

For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I liv…

- Francois Jacob

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and …

- Francois Jacob

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed t…

- Francois Jacob

The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race w…

- Francois Jacob

I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

- Francois Jacob

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

- Francois Jacob

In today’s vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the ma…

- Francois Jacob