Some 300 people work at the Institute (tenured investigators, Ph.D. students, post-docs, technicians, engineers, French and foreign visitors, and administrative staff).

The steering committee comprised, in particular, Jacques Monod and François Jacob, who were to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1965, with their colleague Andre Lwoff from the Institut Pasteur.

By the time Jean-Luc Rossignol took over as director of the Institute in September 1996, around 400 people were working there in 31 labs, including many PhD students and trainees.

He decided to maintain the previous structure of five departments, whilst focusing on the consolidation of research topics around “space” (the components and structural and functional organization of cellular space), “time” (dynamics of the cell and of the evolution of genomes), and the “information flow” on which depends the integrated functioning of cells and organisms.

Alongside the administrative infrastructure, the various technical facilities were grouped together to form a technological platform with an emphasis on imaging, flow cytometry, and molecular modeling.

This IFR was composed of the IJM (“from the molecule to the organism”) and a dozen other labs working in the fields of functional and adaptive biology and epigenetics.