Word: polyoma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus some day, he speculates, man may be able to create artificial genes to replace missing ones in persons suffering from genetic diseases. The same technique could have other far-reaching effects. The polyoma virus, which produces a variety of cancers in many animals, is almost identical in size and complexity to Phi X 174. "If one can take the polyoma DNA and modify it in the test tube by implanting alternate genes," says Kornberg, "some of these could prevent the growth of cancer cells...
California virologists: Italian-born Dr. Renato Dulbecco, 50, now at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, and Dr. (of veterinary medicine) Harry Rubin, 38, of the University of California. Starting with viruses that infect bacteria, Dr. Dulbecco went on to show the mechanism by which polyoma virus, which causes many animal cancers, infects cells. Most important was the striking and unexpected finding that the virus itself, which has a nucleus of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), does not need to multiply in order to cause cancer...
...virus was that of Stewart-Eddy polyoma, named for N.I.H.'s Drs. Sarah Stewart and Bernice Eddy (TIME, July 27). Team members stripped the protein overcoat from the virus particles to get the nuclear content. This proved to be a form of deoxyribonucleic acid, which has an enormously complex structure with a molecular weight of 2,000,000 or more...
...self-propagating cells, some form of DNA is the template that determines what form the daughter cells will take after subdivision. For cancer research, the significance of the polyoma-DNA work is that it showed how foreign DNA, invading normal cells, can upset their reproduction so that cancerous offspring result...