Brave Genius Read online

  ALSO BY SEAN B. CARROLL

  Remarkable Creatures

  The Making of the Fittest

  Endless Forms Most Beautiful

  Copyright © 2013 by Sean B. Carroll

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Permissions are listed on this page, which constitutes an extension of this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carroll, Sean B.

  Brave genius : a scientist, a philosopher, and their daring adventures from the French resistance to the Nobel prize / Sean B. Carroll.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. France—Intellectual life—20th century. 2. Nobel Prize winners—France—Biography. 3. Camus, Albert, 1913–1960. 4. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 5. Authors, Algerian—20th century—Biography. 6. Monod, Jacques. 7. Molecular biologists—France—Biography. 8. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France. 9. Politics and culture—France—History—20th century. I. Title.

  D802.F8C3715 2013

  572.8092—dc23

  [B] 2012050707

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95235-6

  Jacket design: Elena Giavaldi

  Jacket photographs: (Monod) Institut Pasteur; (Camus) Martinie/Getty

  v3.1

  For Olivier and Philippe Monod, Agnès Ullmann, and Geneviève Noufflard; with my deepest respect and gratitude

  We live in deeds, not years;

  in thoughts, not breaths;

  In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

  We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives

  Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

  —PHILIP JAMES BAILEY, Festus

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE CHANCE, NECESSITY, AND GENIUS

  I. THE FALL CHAPTER 1 CITY OF LIGHT

  CHAPTER 2 PLANS

  CHAPTER 3 MISADVENTURES IN NORWAY

  CHAPTER 4 SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

  CHAPTER 5 DEFEATED AND DIVIDED

  II. THE LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM CHAPTER 6 REGROUPING

  CHAPTER 7 ILL WINDS

  CHAPTER 8 AN HOUR OF HOPE

  CHAPTER 9 WAITING AND WORKING

  CHAPTER 10 THE TERROR BEGINS

  CHAPTER 11 THE PLAGUE

  CHAPTER 12 BROTHERS IN ARMS

  CHAPTER 13 DOUBLE LIVES

  CHAPTER 14 PREPARATIONS

  CHAPTER 15 NORMANDY

  CHAPTER 16 LES JOURS DE GLOIRE

  III. SECRETS OF LIFE CHAPTER 17 THE TALK OF THE NATION

  CHAPTER 18 SECRETS OF LIFE

  CHAPTER 19 BOURGEOIS GENETICS

  CHAPTER 20 ON THE SAME PATH

  CHAPTER 21 A NEW BEGINNING

  CHAPTER 22 REBELS WITH A CAUSE

  CHAPTER 23 TAKING SIDES

  CHAPTER 24 THE ATTIC

  IV. NOBEL THOUGHTS AND NOBLE DEEDS CHAPTER 25 THE BLOOD OF THE HUNGARIANS

  CHAPTER 26 REPRESSION AND REACTION

  CHAPTER 27 A VOICE OF REASON

  CHAPTER 28 THE LOGIC OF LIFE

  CHAPTER 29 MAKING CONNECTIONS

  CHAPTER 30 THE POSSIBLE AND THE ACTUAL

  CHAPTER 31 UNFINISHED

  CHAPTER 32 MESSENGERS

  CHAPTER 33 SYNTHESIS

  EPILOGUE: FRENCH LESSONS

  CHAPTER 34 CAMUS IN A LAB COAT

  CHAPTER 35 CHANCE AND NECESSITY: SISYPHUS RETURNS

  Appendix: The Science

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Permissions

  PROLOGUE

  CHANCE, NECESSITY, AND GENIUS

  Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

  —DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784), “On Dramatic Poetry”

  ON OCTOBER 16, 1957, ALBERT CAMUS WAS HAVING LUNCH AT Chez Marius in Paris’s Latin Quarter when a young man approached the table and informed him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  The new laureate-to-be could not hide his anguish.

  Sure, the Algerian-born French writer had been an international figure for more than a decade. He had earned great public admiration for his moral stands as well as for his novels, plays, and essays. But not yet forty-four years old, Camus was only the second youngest writer ever to receive the Nobel. He thought that the prize should honor a complete body of work, and he hoped that his was still unfinished. He dreaded that all of the fanfare surrounding the prize would distract him from his work. The demand for interviews and photographs, and the many party invitations that followed the announcement soon confirmed his fears.

  Camus also worried that the prize would inspire even greater contempt on the part of his critics. Despite his public popularity, Camus had many foes on both the political right, to whom he was a dangerous radical, and the left, among them many former close comrades who had ostracized him for his clear-eyed, damning critiques of Soviet-style Communism. Both camps took the Nobel as proof that Camus’s talent and influence had already peaked.

  “One wonders whether Camus is not on the decline and if … the Swedish Academy was not consecrating a precocious sclerosis,” wrote one scornful commentator.

  After the demand for interviews subsided, he paused to reply to a few well wishers. One handwritten letter was to an old friend in Paris:

  My dear Monod.

  I have put aside for a while the noise of these recent times in order to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your warm letter. The unexpected prize has left me with more doubt than certainty. At least I have friendship to help me face it. I, who feel solidarity with many men, feel friendship with only a few. You are one of these, my dear Monod, with a constancy and sincerity that I must tell you at least once. Our work, our busy lives separate us, but we are reunited again, in one same adventure. That does not prevent us to reunite, from time to time, at least for a drink of friendship! See you soon and fraternally yours.

  Albert Camus

  Camus knew well many of the literary and artistic luminaries of his time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, André Malraux, and Pablo Picasso. But the recipient of Camus’s heartfelt letter was not an artist. This one of his few constant and sincere friends was Jacques Monod, a biologist. And unlike so many other of Camus’s associates, he was not famous, at least not yet. However, despite his pantheon of numerous, more illustrious colleagues, Camus claimed, “I have known only one true genius: Jacques Monod.”

  Eight years after Camus, that genius would make his own trip to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with his close colleagues François Jacob and André Lwoff.

  Each of the four men’s respective prizes recognized exceptional creativity, but they also marked triumphs over great odds. The adventure to which Camus referred in his letter began many years earlier, in a very dark and dangerous time. So dangerous, in fact, that the chances each of these men would have even lived to see those latter days, let alone to ascend to such heights, were remote.

  This is the story of that adventure. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events—of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.

 
CHANCE AND NECESSITY

  Several years after he won the Nobel Prize, Jacques Monod wrote a popular, philosophical perspective on the significance of modern biology for understanding humankind’s place in the universe. The title he chose, Chance and Necessity, was taken from Democritus’s dictum “Everything in the universe is the fruit of chance and of necessity.” It would have been an equally apt title for Monod’s autobiography, or that of any of the other three laureates. The paths their lives took, and the twists that brought them together as comrades, friends, and collaborators, were very much a product of the circumstances imposed upon them and the responses those compelled—of chance and necessity.

  Many years before the honors they received in Stockholm, in the spring of 1940, the four men were living in Paris, quietly pursuing separate, ordinary lives. Camus was an aspiring but unknown twenty-six-year-old writer, working as a layout designer for the newspaper Paris-Soir to make ends meet while toiling on a novel in his spare time. Jacques Monod was an underachieving and, at age thirty, relatively old doctoral student in zoology at the Sorbonne. François Jacob was a nineteen-year-old second-year medical student intent on becoming a surgeon. Thirty-eight-year-old André Lwoff was the only established professional among the four; he directed the department of microbial physiology at the Pasteur Institute.

  Then, in May 1940, catastrophe struck.

  The German Army invaded and quickly overwhelmed France, plunging the country into chaos. This stunning event was the perverse catalyst that, as Diderot prescribed, allowed their genius to flow forth, that set the men on new paths to future greatness and into one another’s lives.

  Knowing of the merciless destruction wreaked upon Poland by the same army the previous fall, millions of French citizens fled the approaching Germans. Jacob was horrified at the sudden disintegration of the country but determined to carry on the fight against Hitler wherever he could. He made the agonizing decision to leave his family and France, and boarded one of the last available boats to England. There, he joined the Free French forces. He would not see his family or step foot on French soil for four years. The next time he saw Paris, it was from the stretcher of an ambulance, encased in a body cast, recovering from near-fatal wounds. The Stuka’s bomb that ended his career as a surgeon was the beginning of his eventual path into science.

  Monod, Camus, and Lwoff remained in France, bearing witness to the progressively harsher life under Nazi occupation. Over the next four years, occupation evolved into oppression and enslavement, accompanied by torture, deportations, and mass murder. Each man was inspired to join the Resistance against the Germans and to contribute whatever talents were useful.

  For Camus, tubercular and not fit for physical action, that meant working for the underground Resistance newspaper Combat. During the Occupation, Camus had managed to publish his novel The Stranger (L’Étranger, 1942), along with a book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), and had even completed two plays. He was becoming known in literary circles around Paris. But the need for secrecy and anonymity in the Resistance was such that he could not reveal his identity to his comrades. Introduced under an assumed name, he simply offered his previous newspaper experience to the group. Camus began by helping select and edit articles and prepare the layout of the paper. Later, he took over as editor. Camus’s voice, which in peacetime might have been limited only to the salon or the theater, found a much grander stage at the pivotal turn of the war. In his inspiring, albeit anonymous, essays and editorials, Camus exhorted Combat readers to take action against the German occupiers and their French collaborators: “Frenchmen, the French Resistance is issuing the only appeal you need to hear … Anyone who isn’t with us is against us. From this moment on there are only two parties in France: the France that has always been and those who shall soon be annihilated for having attempted to annihilate it.”

  After being involved in the dissemination of some underground newspapers, Jacques Monod sought more direct action against the Germans. After getting his Jewish wife settled under a false identity outside of Paris, he joined the best-armed and most militant resistants, the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). He emerged as a highly capable officer and rose to become a high-ranking member of the general staff of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), the organization that coordinated Resistance activities in the latter stage of the Occupation. Monod organized the gathering of weapons and ammunition, planned sabotage that disrupted troop movements and supplies, and helped coordinate the civilian uprisings in Paris as the Allied forces approached.

  It was nerve-wracking work with deadly stakes. The threat of discovery and arrest by the Gestapo was ever-present. Capture meant either deportation to a concentration camp or execution. Several of Monod’s comrades and superiors in the Resistance were arrested, deported, or shot. Monod had to go completely underground, wear a disguise, and hide out—in Lwoff’s laboratory in the attic of the Pasteur Institute. Lwoff also participated in the Resistance: in his Paris apartment, he sheltered Allied airmen who had been shot down so that underground networks could smuggle them out of the country.

  Many of Camus’s associates were exposed. Combat’s printer shot himself in order not to be taken alive and to risk divulging the names of other resistants. One of the few members who knew Camus’s real identity was arrested on a day she was to meet with him, and was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Camus himself was questioned by the police while carrying the layout for an issue of Combat. They did not find the layout, and Camus was released.

  Such risks of participating in the Resistance were necessary, as Camus argued so compellingly in Combat. For individuals, to join was to acknowledge that the ongoing fight concerned every citizen. In taking action one person could inspire others and, Camus suggested, “at least share in the peace at heart that the best of us take with them into the prisons.” Courage and sacrifice in the face of extreme danger were the only available remedies for the humiliation of military defeat and, perhaps more important, for expunging the shame felt over those French who collaborated with the Germans and heaped suffering and death upon their fellow citizens.

  Resistance was also a matter of strategic importance to the Allied military effort. Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower credited the FFI with greatly accelerating the advance of the Allied forces after their landings in Normandy and on the Riviera, speeding the liberation of the country, and reducing Allied losses. Eisenhower estimated the effect of the Resistance to that of fifteen divisions (approximately 150,000 regular army troops). Their losses were certainly significant: some 24,000 resistants were killed in the battles for France.

  Regardless of its exact quantitative effect, the effect of the Resistance on repairing the French psyche was enormous. On the eve of Paris’s liberation, Camus declared: “Four years ago, a few men rose up amid the ruins and despair and quietly proclaimed that nothing was yet lost. They said that the war must go on and that the forces of good could always triumph over the forces of evil provided the price was paid. They paid that price.”

  Only after the liberation of Paris did his readers learn who had actually composed such moving passages in the middle of the battle, and they loved him for it.

  For his part, Camus had learned just how much words matter. He later admitted, “To risk one’s life, however little, to have an article printed is a way of learning the real weight of words.”

  SECRETS OF LIFE

  After the war, each man returned to his livelihood or, in Jacob’s case, forged a new one. Like many others for whom normal life had paused during the war, and whose experiences had imparted a profound appreciation of the fragility of life and freedom, they were each imbued with a much greater sense of urgency and purpose.

  Camus focused much of his writing on the moral and political renewal of the French nation. From the moment of the liberation of Paris, Combat enjoyed a unique prestige. The newspaper would sell out as soon as it was published. In what Claude
Bourdet, a leader of Combat, described as one of “those accidents which condition the life of individuals, if not societies,” Camus had a perfect national pulpit from which to voice his concerns and ideas. In scores of articles, Camus urged that France be rebuilt upon basic principles of equality, individual freedom, and social justice. His editorials were often the talk of Paris.

  Readers also had the opportunity to discover the literary and philosophical works that Camus had written and managed to publish during the war. The terror and cruelty of the Occupation, the slaughter of tens of millions in the war (the second such war in a generation), and the horrors of the Holocaust that were coming to light had made many despair and abandon any hope for the future of humanity. Denial of any meaning or purpose in life—nihilism—was a widespread response.

  But Camus vehemently rejected nihilism and took an entirely different path. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus addressed what he contended was the fundamental issue of philosophy—“judging whether life is or is not worth living.” To Camus, the crux of the matter of life was the certainty of death. The practical question that certainty prompted was: How could one live a meaningful life in full knowledge of the inevitability of death?

  Camus asserted that by recognizing the reality of the physical limits of one’s life, one attained the clarity and freedom to make the most of life as it is. He reasoned that the logical response to the certainty of death was a revolt against death—a revolt that took the form of living life passionately and to the fullest: “Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”

  Camus’s recipe for living life to the fullest was to do nothing in hope of an afterlife, and to rely on courage and reasoning: “The first teaches him to live without appeal [to religion] and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom … and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”