Jacques Lucien Monod (9 February 1910 in Paris - 31 May 1976 in Paris) was a French biologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for his discoveries about the genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis which he shared with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff.
Monod's best-known work explains how llife is the product of a combination of chance and necessity. It has been described as a "manifesto of materialist biology in the most reductivist sense", because Monod says that systems in nature can be explained without introducing any end-goal or purpose. He then argues that certain beliefs and ethics followed from his outlook on biology: atheism, rationalism, anti-Marxism.
During World War II he was a member of the French Resistance.