[1] After studying medicine in Lausanne, where he obtained a doctorate in 1946, Tissières left to do a PhD in England at Cambridge, at the Molteno Institute for Research in Parasitology in the laboratory of David Keilin.
[5] Next, during a short stay at the Pasteur Institute in the laboratory of Jacques Monod in 1959 he showed, with François Gros he met at Harvard, that ribosomes are capable of incorporating amino acids into proteins.
[8] This synthesis was linked to the “puffs” described in 1962 by Ferruccio Ritossa on polytene chromosomes from fly salivary glands subjected to the same stresses.
From 1973, his laboratory devoted itself to the characterization of heat shock proteins and the regulation of messenger RNA transcription of the corresponding genes.
Member of the council of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) from 1968 to 1973 His father, Jules Tissières was a catholic conservative conseiller national for the Parti démocrate-chrétien (Suisse) from 1911 to 1918.
[12] In 1954, with the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, he unsuccessfully attempted the ascent of Rakaposhi (7780 m) in Pakistan with George Band,[13][14] one of the members of the team that had conquered Everest in 1953,[15] a contemporary film of the expedition is in the public domain.