(It is now known that a repressor bound to an operator physically blocks RNA polymerase from binding to the promoter, the site where transcription of the adjacent genes begins.)

[13] Monod coined the term diauxie to denote the frequent observations of two distinct growth phases of bacteria grown on two sugars.

He made an important contribution to enzymology when he collaborated with Jeffries Wyman and Changeux to extend this concept to explain cooperative behaviour of some multi-subunit proteins.

In 1970, Monod published Le hasard et la nécessité – English translation Chance and Necessity (1971) –, a book based on a series of lectures that he had given at Pomona College in 1969.

[19] Monod acknowledges his connection to the French existentialists in the epigraph of the book, which quotes the final paragraphs of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus.

In summarizing recent progress in several areas of biology, including his own research, Monod highlights the ways in which information is found to take physical form and hence become capable of influencing events in the world.

In the title of the book, "necessity" refers to the fact that the enzyme must act as it does, catalyzing a reaction with one substrate but not another, according to the constraints imposed by its structure.

Hence, the combined effects of chance and necessity, which are amenable to scientific investigation, account for our existence and the universe we inhabit, without the need to invoke mystical, supernatural, or religious explanations.

While acknowledging the likely evolutionary origin of a human need for explanatory myths, in the final chapter of Chance and Necessity Monod advocates an objective (hence value-free) scientific worldview as a guide to assessing truth.

It is reasonable to conclude that Monod himself did not find this position bleak; the quotation he chose from Camus to introduce Chance and Necessity ends with the sentence: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

[22] It may be more accurate to suggest that Monod sought to include mind and purpose within the purview of scientific investigation, rather than attributing them to supernatural or divine causes.

The importance of Monod's work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be judged by his influence on philosophers, biologists and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky and Richard Dawkins.

In addition to sharing a Nobel Prize, Monod was also a recipient of the Légion d'honneur and elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.

[29] He became a close friend of Albert Camus, Nobel laureate in literature who had also been active in the French Resistance and shared Monod's criticism of the Soviet system.