Abstract
"Genetics," a mathematician friend once told me, "smells a bit like apples and snakes." I'm afraid that the smell today is much less poetic, as it has gradually become impregnated with chemistry. At the heart of biology, genetics is currently in a state of turmoil. Its place at the Collège de France is therefore justified. It also means that the task of teaching it here is both easy and arduous. Easy, because having to demonstrate the twists and turns of knowledge in constant motion can only be a source of exaltation for the man of science. Arduous, because in the whirlwind of ideas, discoveries and hypotheses, and in the very agitation of one's own thoughts, it's a daunting task to maintain sufficient order and rigor to communicate such a shifting equilibrium... François Jacob
With access to the chemistry of the gene and its functioning, the bacterial cell offered the possibility of giving chemical and physical content to the old biological concepts of heredity, variation and evolution. As early as 1943, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger came to the following conclusion: "The essential element of a living being, the chromosomal fiber, has the same structural solidity as a crystal. It contains, written in cipher language, the entire future of an organism, its development and its functioning." Interpreting the phenomena of life through the properties of the molecular structures that characterize the cell - this became one of the ambitions of biology. We now know that the mechanism of reproduction and heredity is within the reach of our experimental chemistry.
