Sean B. Carroll writes:

Jacques Monod arrived in Paris to some dreadful news. On June 5, 1944, four years into the German occupation of France during World War II, he was supposed to meet with fellow leaders in the French Resistance when his assistant, Geneviève Noufflard, told him that several commanders within the greater Paris region had just been caught by the Gestapo.

Monod was pretty sure that at least one of those arrested knew about the rendezvous he was planning to have that day. Since no one could predict who might buckle under the Gestapo’s pressure and give away names and addresses, he was immediately at risk.

An officer in the bureau that directed ambushes and sabotage against the German forces, Monod had made sure to take many precautions to avoid getting caught. A few months earlier, after his superior in the Resistance had been lured into a trap and captured, Monod had gone completely underground. The 34-year-old biologist abandoned his laboratory research at the Sorbonne, moved his Jewish wife and young sons to the suburbs, adopted a new alias, changed his hair color and clothing style, started wearing tinted glasses, and rotated between different safe houses.

Monod may have gone into hiding, but the meeting that day was crucial. Four nights earlier, the BBC had aired a string of coded messages in French, including “Ma femme a l’oeil vif” (“My wife has a lively expression”), the specific phrase that Monod and Paris commanders had been waiting for that signaled an Allied invasion was imminent.

Taking care to make sure that they weren’t being followed, Monod and Noufflard bicycled to the scheduled meeting six miles south of Paris. As Monod approached the hideout, he was wracked with the same question that had preceded similar clandestine meetings: Should he continue on and walk into the building, and risk never seeing his wife and children again, or just turn around and go back home?

He went inside the house. Other officers soon arrived, and the meeting went off without a hitch. That evening, the BBC broadcasted another stream of messages, including four phrases signaling to the Paris branch of the Resistance that they were to execute their sabotage plans: The invasion was on.

Monod was a man who took chances. He was one of the few early joiners of the Resistance, narrowly escaping arrest in 1940. Three years later, he made two secret trips to Switzerland to solicit arms and other supplies from the Allies. Once the invasion was under way, he crisscrossed boulevards and barricades under fire to help coordinate the uprising that liberated Paris.

But he was also someone who understood chance better than anyone in his day. He was not a mathematician or a bookie, but a biologist, and an extraordinary one at that: A pioneering molecular biologist, he would go on to win a Nobel Prize. Monod spent his life studying what he dubbed “the secrets of life”—the mysterious workings of genes that determine the properties of living things. And at the center of those secrets was the role of chance. He would deploy the idea beyond the realm of science, using it to powerful political and philosophical ends. [Continue reading…]