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Jacques Monod (9 Feb 1910 - 31 May 1976) French biochemist who shared with his fellow researchers the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. They revealed how messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is involved in protein synthesis within a cell. He headed the Pasteur Institute from 1971. Short biography of Jacques Monod >>

Jacques Monod - “There are living systems; there is no living ‘matter.’”

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“There are living systems; there is no living “matter.” No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.”

— Jacques Monod

In Monot and Wainhouse (trans.), Chance and Necessity (1972).

More Jacques Monod quotes on science >>

Context of Jacques Monod's quote, “There are living systems; there is no living ‘matter.’”

Jacques Monod gave an Inaugural Lecture upon taking the chair of molecular biology at the Collège de France (3 Nov 1967). An English translation was printed as a 22-page booklet, From Biology to Ethics, published by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1969. In it, as translated, he declares: 1

“The expression ‘living matter’ is itself senseless.”

His point is that life began, not from any one molecule, but from a system of interacting molecules. Eventually, they included replicating molecules like nucleic acids and catalytic molecules like enzymes. But as essential as they may be to life, and even though it is the molecules alone that comprise the matter, no individual molecule has the property of life. Only when a functional variety of molecules are incorporated together as a system can any semblance of life exist.

In his original statement in French, Monod summarizes this fact as:

Il y a des systèmes vivants; il n’y a pas de “matière” vivante. (There are living systems; there is no living “matter.”)

This remark was followed by the reminder of the quote above: “No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.”

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