Lwoff, André [key], 1902–94, French microbiologist, b. Ainay-le-Château, Allier dept., central France, of Russian-Polish origin. He was educated in France and in 1925 began a long association with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1959 he also became a professor at the Sorbonne. In the 1920s his study of the morphogenesis of protozoans led to the discovery of extranuclear inheritance in these organisms. His treatise L'évolution physiologique, published in 1941, developed the thesis of biochemical evolution by progressive losses of biosynthetic capacity. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jacques Monod and François Jacob for his discovery that the genetic material of a virus can be assimilated by bacteria and passed on to succeeding generations.
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