Biologist François Gros, co-discoverer of messenger RNA, is dead

He contributed, alongside the most eminent figures in scientific research, to the birth of molecular biology, which has revolutionized the life sciences. The biologist François Gros, who took part in all the adventures of modern biology, died on Friday February 18 at the age of 95, announced Sunday to Agence France-Presse Etienne Ghys, mathematician and perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences.

Co-discoverer, with François Jacob, messenger RNA – the molecular intermediary of the DNA genetic code – its contribution to the deciphering of the gene was capital. His work paved the way, almost sixty years later, for the use of this technology in main vaccines used against Covid-19.

“Everything seemed to us to discover”

Entering the Pasteur Institute after the war, he subsequently rubbed shoulders with André Lwoff, François Jacob and Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1965. He was named Director General of the Pasteur Institute from 1976 to 1981, and entered the Academy of Sciences in 1979. He became permanent secretary from 1991 to 2001. At the same time, he held the chair of cellular biochemistry at the Collège de France until 1996.

Born in Paris on April 24, 1925 into a family “non-practicing Israelite”François Gros retreated to Toulouse during the Second World War. “Perpetually at the mercy of a denunciation”he changes his name regularly, he says in his Scientific memoirs – Half a century of biology (2003). A distracted student, he enrolled in the Faculty of Science in Toulouse by mistake, thinking he was in line for the Faculty of Medicine.

On the benches of the university, he is passionate about botany. After the Liberation, he joined the Sorbonne in November 1944 and then made his debut as a volunteer at the Institut Pasteur in 1946. The first research on antibiotics was then carried out there, initiated by Alexander Flemming, Nobel Prize for Medicine the previous year.

At the time, “almost everything is DIY” : the young biochemist thus recounts that, equipped with a large pot full of acid, he used to go by bus to the slaughterhouses of Paris to recover beef muscles, livers and pancreas, for his research on antibiotics. The operation between “folklore and nightmare”, “didn’t dampen our enthusiasm. Everything then seemed to us to be discovered (…) with the means at hand”.

Dismissal in tainted blood case

The young laboratory head Jacques Monod soon took him under his wing and recommended that he go to the United States. In 1960, he succeeded in demonstrating messenger RNA for the first time in Jim Watson’s laboratory at Harvard. At the same time on the American west coast, three other researchers, including the French biologist François Jacob, made the same discovery.

He became friends with François Mitterrand, Elie Wiesel and Ephraïm Katzir: “Few men have found in me such a profound resonance of friendship and respect”. In the early 1980s, he was called to Matignon as scientific advisor to Pierre Mauroy and then to Laurent Fabius. As such, in the case of contaminated blood, justice accuses him of having delayed in 1985 the approval of the American test for screening for the AIDS virus while waiting for the test developed by the Pasteur Institute to be ready. He benefits from a dismissal.

In the 1990s, he followed the mad race for genome sequencing. The French were then the pioneers of mapping the human genetic heritage.

Considered one of the most vigilant consciences in research, he preferred codes of ethics closer to reality than the adoption of laws. Married twice and father of three boys, he was the initiator of scientific and technical exchanges with India and Africa with the creation of Coped (Comité ” developing countries “) of which he assumed the presidency until June 2017.