André Michel Lwoff shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with François Jacob and Jaques Monod "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis," and contributing to "our knowledge of the fundamental processes in living matter which form the bases for such phenomena as adaption, reproduction, and evolution." Lwoff's fascination with microscopic life and his highly analytical mind helped identify disease production in organisms, including its genetic and metabolic mechanisms of action.

Lwoff was born in Ainay-le-Château, a tiny town in Central France, to Russian immigrants of Jewish faith--Marie Siminovitch, a sculptor, and Salomon Lwoff, a psychiatrist and chief physician at a psychiatric hospital. He often accompanied his father to different hospitals and, on one such occasion, met his father's friend, Elie Metchnikoff, who allowed the young lad to peer at a typhoid bacillus under a microscope.

As Lwoff...