In 1934, he became an assistant in the zoology laboratory of the Faculty of Science at the University of Paris. That same year, he took part in a scientific expedition to Greenland with Paul-Emile Victor. Two years later, as a Rockefeller fellow at the California Institute of Technology, he trained in genetics. And in 1941, Jacques Monod defended his thesis on the growth of bacterial cultures.

During the Second World War, his activities in the Resistance prevented him from attending the Sorbonne, and he often took refuge and worked at the Institut Pasteur. After the Liberation, he joined this prestigious institute as head of the microbial physiology laboratory in André Lwoff’s department. In 1954, he created and headed the cellular biochemistry department. Appointed Professor at the Paris Faculty of Science in 1959, he taught metabolic chemistry.

In 1965, together with François Jacob and André Lwoff, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine “for their discoveries on the genetic regulation of enzyme and virus synthesis”.
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1965/monod-lecture.html
Also with François Jacob, Jacques Monod conceived and demonstrated the reality of messenger RNA.

Appointed to the Institut Pasteur’s Scientific and Administrative Boards in 1965 and 1967 respectively, and Chair of Molecular Biology at the Collège de France in 1967, he became Director of the Institut Pasteur in 1971.
Jacques Monod died in Cannes in 1976.

In 1970, Jacques Monod published a book entitled Le Hasard et la Nécessité: un essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne (Chance and Necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology), the main aim of which was to combat cosmic theology (“necessity”).