The Improbable French Buddies ‘Brave Genius’ Is a Story of Science, Philosophy and Bravery in Wartime These days, science and philosophy don’t seem to be the best of friends. Some prominent scientists dismiss philosophers as chasing vague concepts into “murky and inconsequential” rabbit holes, as the physicist Steven Weinberg once put it. And philosophers accuse scientists of imperial overreach in their attempts to claim ultimate authority on questions like consciousness, free will and the existence of God. But in “Brave Genius,” Sean B. Carroll tells the interlocking stories of a philosopher and a scientist, Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, who were not just’ passionate friends but sometimes seemed to be living two versions of the same life. Both were active in the French Resistance during World War II, and after the war both devoted themselves to fighting the intellectual corrosions of Communist ideology. Both men won the Nobel Prize, Camus for literature and Monod for physiology, in recognition of fundamental discoveries about the regulation of gene expression, and the similarities run even deeper. Both Camus and Monod, Dr. Carroll writes, were concerned with the same fundamental problem: how to act morally, even heroically, in a random, indifferent universe. Camus, whose 100th birthday is being commemorated this year in France, will be the marquee attraction for many readers. Dr. Carroll, a molecular biologist, occasional contributor to Science Times and onetime college French major, tells his story crisply if somewhat dutifully — from Camus’s early days as a journalist through his first literary success with “The Stranger,” his rise to global fame and his premature death in a car crash in 1960, at age 46. But Monod, whose name will ring few bells among nonscientists, comes off as the far more swashbuckling and intriguing figure. Born in 1910, he joined the Resistance as a young researcher at the Sorbonne (where he liked to hide sensitive documents inside the leg of a mounted giraffe outside his office), eventually rising to a top position in the main national Resistance network. While Camus was writing anonymous editorials for the Resistance newspaper Combat, Monod was organizing the sabotage of rail lines and, in one particularly suspenseful episode reconstructed by Dr. Carroll, evading the Gestapo by going underground with a colleague posing as an artist. After the war, Monod returned to research at the Pasteur Institute, but found himself drawn back into politics. In 1948, he published a blistering front-page article in Combat attacking the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko as a pseudo scientist. The article — “a condemnation of the entire Soviet system of thinking and of its leadership,” Dr. Carroll writes — drew a firestorm of protest from France’s powerful Communist Party. It also brought Monod into the orbit of Camus, who drew on the scientist’s ideas for a chapter in “The Rebel,” his 1951 attack on totalitarianism. “Brave Genius” is briskly paced and ambitiously sprawling, offering potted accounts of historical episodes large and small (the fall of France, the 1956 Hungarian crisis, Camus’s famous feud with Jean-Paul Sartre, the discovery of the double helix), along with finer-grained descriptions of Camus’s and Monod’s work. Dr. Carroll has done some impressive archival digging, turning up fresh and often vivid details about Monod’s dogged efforts to smuggle dissidents out of Hungary at a time when his scientific work was at full pitch. One Hungarian scientist, in a bit of lab-inspired derring-do, sent Monod secret messages written in invisible ink made from starch, which turned blue when exposed to iodine solution. But the book, written in an unwaveringly heroic key, never quite makes either man come alive from the inside, or conveys the substance of a friendship Dr. Carroll claims was one of the few “constant and sincere” connections in Camus’s life. He quotes some affectionate letters and book inscriptions traded by the two men. But he almost never shows them together, beyond the occasional vaguely invoked dinner party. (“Cold war politics were never far from their conversation,” he writes in a typically broad sentence.) Dr. Carroll is much more successful at illuminating the deeper parallels between the two men’s work. Monod, in his view, was not only a brilliant researcher and a national moral conscience that stood with French students at the barricades in 1968 and spoke out on issues like birth control and racial equality. He was also “Camus in a lab coat,” a profound thinker who linked life’s deepest meanings to its hidden mechanics. Monod’s discoveries, Dr. Carroll writes, helped provide the intellectual scaffolding for understanding “one of the greatest mysteries of biology: the development of a complex creature from a single fertilized egg.” In his 1970 book “Chance and Necessity” (a best-seller in France second only to Erich Segal’s “Love Story” for much of that year), Monod explained those discoveries for a popular audience, explicitly tying them to his friend’s existential philosophy. “Molecular biology,” Dr. Carroll writes, “had brought Monod full circle to Camus’s territory of the absurd condition — that contradiction between the human longing for meaning and the universe’s silence.” “Chance and Necessity” took its epigraph from Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus,” thus repaying an earlier compliment from Camus that readers of “Brave Genius” may not find at all absurd: “I have only known one true genius: Jacques Monod.”
Posted on: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 14:30:51 +0000
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