Two books that marked their epoch – A personal encounter

Abstract

This article describes my personal encounter with Francois Jacob’s The Logic of Living Systems and Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity. I became aware of the two books right at the beginning of my studies of biology in 1973, and Jacob’s book in particular has accompanied my academic itinerary ever since. The paper follows the different stages of this itinerary from the 1970s onwards, starting from Louis Althusser’s engagement with Monod and Jacques Derrida’s with Jacob in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through my activities as a molecular biologist in the 1980s, to my engagement for a historical epistemology at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin since the 1990s.