"I carry a kind of inner statue within me, a statue sculpted since childhood that gives my life a continuity. It is the most intimate part of me, the core of my character. I have been carving this statue all my life. I have been constantly retouching, polishing, refining it. Here, the chisel and the gouge are encounters and interactions; discordant rhythms; the almanac of emotions whose stray pages slip from one chapter into the next". 

François Jacob is professor at the Institut Pasteur and at the Collège de France. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with A. Lwoff and J. Monod.