Andre Lwoff

Andre Lwoff was a French microbiologist known for discovering the mechanism by which certain bacteriophages, which he named proviruses, can lie dormant inside a bacterium before later becoming active and destroying their host, a phenomenon called lysogeny. His research on this switch between dormant and active viral states, carried out mainly at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, laid groundwork for later understanding of gene regulation. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis, the same body of work that produced the operon model. Lwoff joined the Institut Pasteur at age nineteen, completed his doctorate in 1932, spent several years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and held a fellowship at the University of Cambridge, before returning to the Institut Pasteur in 1938 to lead the department where he carried out his most significant research. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1958 and received the Leeuwenhoek Medal in 1960.