Word: temin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Deadly Message. Gallo's hypothesis tends to support the iconoclastic ideas of Howard Temin, a University of Wisconsin molecular biologist who long espoused what his colleagues considered a major heresy. According to accepted theory, the hereditary information in the chromosomes of all cells passes in the same direction. Double-stranded DNA molecules make single-stranded messenger RNA molecules, which then direct the production of proteins, the basic building blocks of every cell. Temin contended that the process is sometimes reversed: RNA, he insisted, could make DNA. Otherwise, he asked, how could cancer-causing viruses−which consist of bundles...
...dogma was challenged experimentally in 1964, when Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin suggested that certain viruses consisting of only RNA and a protein sheath may cause cancer by making their own DNA once they invade a host cell. This new DNA would then become permanently incorporated in the host cell, giving orders for the production of cancerous cells and more cancer-producing viruses...
Invading Viruses. Teminism, as the theory came to be called, received little support from other scientists; it suggested that RNA could pass genetic information along to DNA, a clear reversal of accepted dogma. But Temin refused to abandon his idea. He knew that tumor-causing RNA viruses somehow inject their deadly message permanently into the host cell; otherwise, the cancer would not be passed on during cell division to future generations of cells. Yet the invading viruses carry with them no DNA of their own. Therefore, Temin reasoned, they must somehow make DNA after invading the host cell. The only...
Last month, Temin with his colleague, Satoshi Mizutani. and David Baltimore of M.I.T. published back-to-back papers in the journal Nature offering experimental evidence that RNA viruses causing cancer in animals are capable of assembling their own DNA. Their work was quickly confirmed by Sol Spiegelman, head of Columbia University's Institute for Cancer Research and one of molecular biology's most brilliant experimenters...