I got a copy of this book long time ago and still remember almost as if happens yesterday. The positive effects of this book have in my life are unforgetable. Actually one of the reasons I decided to became a scientist was because the way Francois Jacob found his way in hard times. The book details his experiences during the second world war and after. In these days, we are in a new century and it seems that we haven't learn much about peace and respect and we have quite similar hard time as Francois Jacob describes. However, I totally believes that this book will be a positive hit for all students in Jr college and high schools and for sure will encourage the scientist of the future to take over this activity. The future of those that identify themselfs with Francois Jacob's life will be significant as time advance.

Even though I am a molecular biologist, I began reading The Statue Within with a bit of prejudice that it would be good for me but not necessarily interesting. I figured it would be beneficial to learn more detail about the work of one of the founders of my field. Boy was I surprised! What I got instead was the examination of a complex and vivid personality, a life filled with great flux, confusion, but most of all, a passion for knowledge. Dr. Jacob started off as a reluctant medical student, went to England to escape the Nazi takeover of Paris, signed up with DeGaulle's unofficial French army and served as a medic in a messy, confusing war. Afterward he returned to Paris and his medical studies, but, lacking direction, found himself in the midst of new and interesting biological research about genetics. Fascinated and obsessed, he pestered and cajoled his way into a top laboratory at the Pasteur Institute and began to experiment. His work of course was fundamental to the understanding of the mechanical functioning of genetics, and he went on to win the Nobel. But the beauty of the book is that it isn't about the glory and accolades - it is about the thirst for knowledge and the collaborative bonds that form between bright minds. It is very good for a scientist to be reminded of the essential nature of curiosity and the trial and defense of ones hypotheses. I will be reading this one for the rest of my career!

This collection of Truffaut's letters is an extraordinary portrait of a man of enormous charm, passion, integrity and (sometimes brutal) honesty. The immediacy of his writing makes his voice emanate from these pages. What an enormous privilege it must have been to count oneself among his friends. And what a daunting foe he must have been as well.

An inspiring, invigorating book.

I agree with the other reviews -- this book, by a Nobel Prize winner, no less, has a fascinating topic; yet, over and over, the author starts building up to a conclusion, and just as he's about to reach that conclusion and share the learned insights, he goes off on another path.
He also makes glaring mistakes about relativity and astronomy when he claims "that if you travel long enough and fast enough through the galaxies, you'll become young again" and "our entire world came into being in a few hundredths of a second."
Instead, very fast travel will make you age more slowly than your non-traveling and relatively fast-aging peers, but you won't "become young again," and the Earth was formed in a very slow process -- it was the initial Big Bang, not the creation of the Earth, that was fast.

Like music out of the romantic period, this book starts going nowhere, then promises to go somewhere, but ends up going nowhere.

The middle chapters talking about Lysenko and his anti-science... and the parts about genome research were interesting.

Perhaps it's the translation, but this book dances around its point, and lacks coherence. It's meant, I think, to convey a sense of how it feels to work on science, particularly biological science, but it never really draws us in. Written more as a series of independent essays, it turns out to be not all that memorable, and not all that interesting.