The structure of all living matter is determined by the composition of its deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, molecule; the discovery in the early 1950s that the genetic code carried by DNA is responsible for the shape of all the proteins that make up skin, eyes, hair--all the tissues of life--astounded the scientific community at the time. But how this master plan is carried out, and how its instructions are read and followed by the body, were facts discovered much later by French biologist Jacques Lucien Monod and a small cadre of scientists working with him. Monod and his colleagues postulated, and later demonstrated, the process by which messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) carries instructions for protein synthesis from the DNA in a cell's nucleus to its cytoplasm, where the instructions are carried out. Monod and two fellow researchers, Francois Jacob and André Lwoff, won the 1965 Nobel Prize for...