So says Odile Jacob, a young woman who has coaxed scientists into writing best-sellers and launched an instant-success publishing company, Editions Odile Jacob.
Yes, the name does ring a bell. Odile is the daughter of Francois Jacob, the Pasteur Institute's Nobel Prize-winning biologist.
"I grew up in an intellectual, male-dominated environment," says Madame Jacob. "I have three brothers; when I was a girl and my father thought I did something right, he complimented me with 'That's a good boy!'"
She remembers her father launching "immense intellectual conversations. I wanted to keep up, so at 16 I started reading authors such as Spinoza and Descartes."
After passing her baccalaurèat (the examination at the end of secondary studies), she entered the prestigious Ecole Normale, skipping the preparatory year. She studied psychology and philosophy, failed her final exam, but received a French scholarship to attend Harvard, where she studied with Noam Chomsky and ...
