Who could have guessed that the lowly fruit fly might hold the key for decoding heredity? Or that the mouse might one day disclose astonishing evolutionary secrets? In a book infused with wisdom, wonder, and a healthy dose of wry skepticism, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist François Jacob walks us through the surprising ways of science, particularly the science of biology, in this century. Of Flies, Mice, and Men is at once a work of history, a social study of the role of scientists in the modern world, and a cautionary tale of the bumbling and brilliance, imagination and luck, that attend scientific discovery. A book about molecules, reproduction, and evolutionary tinkering, it is also about the way biologists work, and how they contemplate beauty and truth, good and evil. Animated with anecdotes from Greek mythology, literature, episodes from the history of science, and personal experience, Of Flies, Mice, and Men tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. In particular, Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society. Alternately cast as the soothsayer Tiresias, the conscienceless inventor Daedalus, or Prometheus, conveyer of dangerous knowledge, the scientist in our day must instead adopt the role of truthteller, Jacob suggests. And the crucial truth that molecular biology teaches is the one he elaborates with great clarity and grace in this book: that all animals are made of the same building blocks, by a combinatorial system that always rearranges the same elements according to new forms.

"François Jacob is one of the world's leading scientists, a professor of the Collège de France and the Institut Pasteur, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine (with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod). He has written an extraordinarily thought-provoking and far-ranging book on evolution which, as he states in his preface, "deals with genes and men, with sex, aging, and molecules. Above all, it deals with the theory of evolution, its status as well as its content. For if the theory of evolution provides a framework without which there is little hope to understand where we come from and why we are as we are, it is important to define the limits beyond which it is used no longer as a scientific theory, but as a myth.""--Back cover.