Andre Lwoff: A Man of Two Cultures

Andre Lwoff (1902–1994) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 along with his two colleagues Jacques Monod and François Jacob for their discovery of feedback inhibition as a form of metabolic control in bacteria. Lwoff spent most of his career as Director of Microbial Physiology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, moving to the Cancer Research Institute in Villejuif in 1968. He loved the south of France and had a summer home (an ancient fortress called the "Mas Guillaume") in Banyuls on the Mediterranean Sea, where he often spent time painting. In 1972, he retired there to paint full time [1].

Lwoff's interest in arts came naturally, as his mother was a sculptor and painter [2], and it is likely that he acquired an interest in, as well as some skill at, drawing and painting as a child. He did not, however, develop his talents until middle age, focusing his early efforts on developing his scientific career.

Lwoff was fortunate in finding, at the age of 19, the perfect scientific and artistic mentor in Edouard Chatton (1883–1947), a zoologist who specialized in pathogenic microorganisms. The two men eventually published 55 papers together. As a younger colleague has commented, "'Master' and 'pupil' had in common perseverance in their scientific work, conception and observation, a critical sense and rigor but also a great artistic sensibility that painting and drawing in the exceptional surroundings of Banyuls-sur-mer … fulfilled" [3]. Indeed, all of Chatton's students remarked on the extraordinary illustrations that accompanied his lectures: Chatton took the time to paint color portraits of all of the major microbes and their diagnostic features on large boards that he displayed at the front of the class. Students were expected to copy these, but few achieved the beauty and precision of the originals. Under Chatton's tutelage, however, Lwoff at least became "enchanted by the beauty of the forms he discovered under the microscope" [4].

Fig. 1.

Andre Lwoff, Summer House, le Mas Guillaume, undated, cover of the EMBO Journal 14, No. 14 (1995) <www.nature.com/emboj/index.html>. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Lwoff's colleague Agnes Ullmann notes, "This was the first time that John Tooze [Editor of the EMBO Journal] agreed to put something non-scientific on the cover of the journal" (personal communication 13 January 2009). Subsequently, EMBO Journal covers have featured the artwork of dozens of artistic scientists.

The search for elegance and beauty was an essential component of the method that Lwoff learned at Chatton's hands. Lwoff wrote that one of the reasons he became a microbiologist rather than, say, a physicist, was that "I do not like either mathematics or statistics. … I like to see things, not calculate probabilities" [5,6]. Seeing things meant, as his colleague Jacob relates, that "he liked to work by himself, with his own hands, helped by his wife, Marguerite … For him, science was an affair of the senses" [7]. Indeed, so important was this sensual approach to his material that Jacob goes on to say, "Science he practised as an artist; indeed, he was above all an artist" [8]. The same sentiment was echoed by another of Lwoff's collaborators, Agnes Ullmann: "Lwoff … was, above all, an artist. As Jacques Monod noted, he revealed the same talents in every domain: elegance, sensibility, precision, finesse, freedom; in a word, style" [9].

Related to this artistic approach to science, Lwoff also cultivated an unusual method of "working by intuition" [10] rather than by reason or theory. "That which is important, as much for art as for science, is intuition," Lwoff wrote, "but neither can one ignore inspiration and chance, which are of great importance especially to the scientist" [11]. This intuitive methodology tied together art and science for Lwoff: "The creator always obeys intuition. When it produces in me the explosive need to paint, it is stronger than I" [12]. Thus, just as he let intuition guide his experimental work, he also let it guide his painting: "In making a painting, I never...