60 ch14dn ahistory2008

Editor's Notes

• #6: Fred Griffith, English microbiologist, dies in the Blitz in London in 1941
• #8: 1. Purified S strain extracts to characterize the transforming principle. 2. Material was resistant to proteases; it contained no lipid or carbohydrate. 3. If DNA in the extract is destroyed, the transforming principle is lost. 4. Pure DNA isolated from the S strain extract transforms R strain. 5. Avery cautiously suggested that DNA was the genetic material. 6. This was the first experimental evidence that DNA is the genetic material.
• #9: Maclyn McCarty (June 9, 1911 – January 2, 2005) was an American geneticist. Oswald Avery (October 21, 1877–2 February 1955) was a Canadian-born American physician and medical researcher. Colin Munro MacLeod (January 28, 1909 — February 11, 1972) was a Canadian-American geneticist. After Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty published the 1944 article, a number of their contemporaries immediately understood that transformation was the transfer of genetic material from one bacterium to another, and that the transforming substance, DNA, must be the genetic material. However, the team's somewhat tentatively stated conclusions were not met with complete acceptance. At the time, the belief that DNA was a monotonous chain of four repeating nucleotides--structurally important but of little physiological interest--was still difficult to overcome. The belief that only proteins possessed the structural complexity necessary to carry hereditary information was pervasive among geneticists. Many of the scientists who had previously thought that genetic material was protein still believed that the effects of the transforming principle were perhaps due to some undetected protein associated with the DNA.
• #14: Martha Cowles Chase (1927 – August 8, 2003) was a young laboratory assistant in the early 1950s when she and Alfred Hershey conducted one of the most famous experiments in 20th century biology. Devised by American bacteriophage expert Alfred Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory New York, the famous experiment demonstrated the genetic properties of DNA over proteins. By marking bacteriophages with radioactive isotopes, Hershey and Chase were able to trace protein and DNA to determine which is the molecule of heredity. Hershey and Chase announced their results in a 1952 paper. The experiment inspired American researcher James D. Watson, who along with England's Francis Crick figured out the structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge the following year. Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück. Chase, however, did not reap such rewards for her role. A graduate of The College of Wooster in Ohio (she had grown up in Shaker Heights, Ohio), she continued working as a laboratory assistant, first at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and then at the University of Rochester before moving to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. There she married biologist Richard Epstein and earned her Ph.D. in 1964 from the University of Southern California. A series of personal setbacks through the 1960s ended her career in science. She spent decades suffering from a form of dementia that robbed her of short-term memory. She died on August 8, 2003.
• #16: Watson & Crick’s model was inspired by 3 recent discoveries: Chargaff’s rules Pauling’s alpha helical structure of a protein X-ray crystallography data from Franklin & Wilkins
• #18: A chemist by training, Franklin had made original and essential contributions to the understanding of the structure of graphite and other carbon compounds even before her appointment to King's College. Unfortunately, her reputation did not precede her. James Watson's unflattering portrayal of Franklin in his account of the discovery of DNA's structure, entitled "The Double Helix," depicts Franklin as an underling of Maurice Wilkins, when in fact Wilkins and Franklin were peers in the Randall laboratory. And it was Franklin alone whom Randall had given the task of elucidating DNA's structure. The technique with which Rosalind Franklin set out to do this is called X-ray crystallography. With this technique, the locations of atoms in any crystal can be precisely mapped by looking at the image of the crystal under an X-ray beam. By the early 1950s, scientists were just learning how to use this technique to study biological molecules. Rosalind Franklin applied her chemist's expertise to the unwieldy DNA molecule. After complicated analysis, she discovered (and was the first to state) that the sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA lies on the outside of the molecule. She also elucidated the basic helical structure of the molecule. After Randall presented Franklin's data and her unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar, her work was provided - without Randall's knowledge - to her competitors at Cambridge University, Watson and Crick. The scientists used her data and that of other scientists to build their ultimately correct and detailed description of DNA's structure in 1953. Franklin was not bitter, but pleased, and set out to publish a corroborating report of the Watson-Crick model. Her career was eventually cut short by illness. It is a tremendous shame that Franklin did not receive due credit for her essential role in this discovery, either during her lifetime or after her untimely death at age 37 due to cancer.
• #29: Matthew Stanley Meselson (b. May 24, 1930) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist whose research was important in showing how DNA replicates, recombines and is repaired in cells. In his mature years, he has been an active chemical and biological weapons activist and consultant. He is married to the medical anthropologist and biological weapons writer Jeanne Guillemin. Dr. Franklin William Stahl (born October 8, 1929) is an American molecular biologist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for the "replicated" strand. He is Emeritus Professor of Biology[1] at the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene, Oregon.