Abstract
American medicine may have abandoned phages by the end of World War II, but the viruses were about to land a starring role in the budding field of molecular biology. A group of now-legendary scientists plucked phages from near-obscurity and used them to peer into the fundamental building block of life: the gene. In doing so, they unraveled many of the mysteries that had long confounded phage researchers: whether or not phages are living organisms, how, if at all, they destroy bacteria and, on a more basic level, how they look.
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Notes
- 1.
“Thinking About Science,” 82.
- 2.
“Thinking About Science,” 82.
- 3.
Schrodinger, Erwin, “What Is Life?” Cambridge: At the University Press, 1947, pg. 57.
- 4.
“What Is Life?” p. 64.
- 5.
H. J. Muller, “Variation Due to Change in the Individual Gene,” Amer. Nat., 56 (1922), cited in Summers, “How Bacteriophage Came to Be Used by the Phage Group,” pg. 262.
- 6.
Delbruck, Oral history 1978, pg. 63, Delbruck Papers, Caltech Archives, cited in Summers, William C., “How Bacteriophage Came to Be Used by the Phage Group.”
- 7.
“Thinking about Science: Max Delbruck and the Origins of Molecular Biology,” Ernst Peter Fischer and Carol Lipson. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. 1988, pg. 73.
- 8.
Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, Watson, 244.
- 9.
John Cairns, Preface to the Expanded Edition, “Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology.” 1992 viii.
- 10.
“Electron Microscopy of Phages,” by Thomas F. Anderson pg. 64–65, in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology.
- 11.
Hershey and Chase’s results confirmed those from a 1943 experiment by Oswald Avery and colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute that found that DNA, not protein, appeared to be “the fundamental unit of the transforming principle” of bacteria that cause pneumonia. Paper reference: Oswald T. Avery, et al., “Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types: Induction of Transformation by a Deoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III, Journal of Experimental Medicine 79 (Feb. 1, 1944).
- 12.
Ibid., 76.
- 13.
Summers, “Felix d’Herelle”, pg. 67.
- 14.
Emory L. Ellis, “Bacteriophage: One-Step Growth,” in “Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology,” p. 57.
- 15.
John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, James D. Watson eds., “Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology,” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, Long Island, NY, 1966, pg. 5.
- 16.
Stent, Gunther “Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses,” W. H. Freedman and Col, San Francisco, 1963, p. 8.
- 17.
Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, Stent, 7.
- 18.
Interview with Ryland Young, Texas A&M. Fall, 2002.
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Kuchment, A. (2012). Naked Genes. In: The Forgotten Cure. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0251-0_4
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