Jean Weigle

Jean-Jacques Weigle (9 July 1901 – 28 December 1968) was a Swiss molecular biologist at Caltech and formerly a physicist at the University of Geneva from 1931 to 1948. He is known for his major contributions on field of bacteriophage λ research, focused on the interactions between those viruses and their E. coli hosts.

Jean Weigle was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where he obtained his PhD in physics in 1923, from the University of Geneva. He married Ruth Juliette Falk, a widow. He died in Pasadena, California, after suffering a heart attack in 1968.

As a physicist he was awarded for his research on of x-ray diffraction to the study of crystal structure; the effects of temperature on this diffraction; the diffraction of light by ultrasonics. He was working as professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1920s. At the University of Geneva he became director of the Institute of Physics in 1931. He developed the first electron microscope made in Switzerland, an important factor for the studies of molecular biology leading to creation in 1964 of the Institute of Molecular Biology (MOLBIO) by Edouard Kellenberger and others.

After suffering his first heart attack in 1946 he emigrated to the USA in 1948, resigned from the faculty of the University of Geneva and went to Caltech in Pasadena, California. There he turned to biology and worked in the Phage group of Max Delbrück, Seymour Benzer, Elie Wollman, and Gunther Stent. He helped in their research the Nobel laureate Werner Arber, George Streisinger, and Giuseppe Bertani also known as "Joe" or "Gio".

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